The publication of Xavier Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death is an important contribution to the English-speaking world's knowledge of Mexican literature and of poetry in Spanish. It is, in a sense, a curiously belated translation, both of Villaurrutia's poetry, here beautifully translated by Eliot Weinberger, and of Octavio Paz's accompanying essay, "Hieroglyphs of Desire" (1978), translated by Esther Allen. Villaurrutia began publishing these poems in the late 1920s and published the definitive collected edition in 1946. Villaurrutia's poetry occupies a strong place in the canons of Mexican poetry; he was also a dramatist and critic. He and his work, however, have been difficult to place within an overall vision of Latin American literature. Ahistorical, not quite in step with the most recognized vanguard poets of his time, Villaurrutia belonged to that literary group known as the "Contemporáneos," important in the thirties and forties, whose history stands somewhat apart from the currents we most associate often with post-revolutionary Mexican culture.

Acknowledged as a major poet in Mexico, Villaurrutia (1903-1950) along with José Gorostiza, Carlos Pellicer, Salvador Novo, Jorge Cuesta, among others of the "Contemporáneos," was one of the founders of the literary magazine of the same name. Paz, while acknowledging several of this group as his literary mentors, is somewhat ambivalent in his evaluations of them. Of their poetry he says, "A poetry with wings but without the weight—the nightmare—of history" (105). For Paz, it is a poetry devoid of people: "In the poems of Gorostiza, Villaurrutia, and Ortiz de Montellano no one is there: everyone and everything has become a reflection, a ghost" (105). He characterizes their stance as that of "inner exile," and develops a group portrait which, though handy for classification, perhaps characterizes them as more similar than they were.

With Paz's evocations and evaluations in this fascinating essay, there is quite clearly an anxiety of literary paternity. Paz traces for us a personal as well as literary history in Mexico, touching on other topics such as the representation of death and the erotic in several cultures and times. His history, luckily for its readers, is somewhat idiosyncratic, mixing personal reminiscence with cultural and political history. He tells us that Villaurrutia, like most of his literary brotherhood, held posts in the Mexican government. Yet in Mexico's post-revolutionary years, especially during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, those who did not adhere to the nationalist revolutionary ideology were sometimes isolated, censored, or worse. Complicating matters even further, Villaurrutia, like several members of the Contemporaries, was openly homosexual in a society dominated by machismo. It is this fact which perhaps accounts for the makings of the "inner exile" to which Paz refers, and which has moved Weinberger to bring us these translations.

In his preface, Eliot Weinberger tells us that his outrage at the censorship and homophobia directed at the National Endowment of the Arts in 1990 prompted these translations, a project he had planned for many years. Thus another context for Villaurrutia's poetry is created, that of the homosexual poet writing erotic poetry in repressive societies. As Weinberger states, "he was one of the great poets of desire: one whose beloved, finally, is not another man but Death itself, Death himself (2).

Even without the contexts given by Paz and Weinberger, Villaurrutia's poetry speaks for itself. Not a prolific poet—almost all his poetry is included here—he was nevertheless a major one. Paz underlines the visual nature of Villaurrutia's poetry, a plasticity noted by most readers. But there is also a sonorous universe here, that of a poet in love with language, its traditions and its sounds. In these impeccable translations, this sound quality, the echoes of other poets—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rubén Darío and Ramón López Velarde, among others—andverse forms associated with them, must be sacrificed to another language. What the translator does capture, however, is the poet's playfulness with language, his love of antitheses, the familiarization of oxymorons.

While Villaurrutia's themes are largely somber ones—death, nostalgia, shadow, dream, doubt, anguish—the palpable presence of his language relieves their shadows. His is a very physical, yet not earthy or colloquial language that makes the antitheses he draws—sleep and wakefulness, life and death, desire and nothingness, take on a life of their own. A dream wishes to escape from the body ("Nocturne: Imprisoned"), parts of the body fall apart like syllables in word games ("Nocturne: Nothing is Heard"), the body descends through the sky in sleep ("Nocturne: Dream"), death hides in the folds of a suitcase taken to New Haven ("Nocturne: Death Speaks"), hidden erotic thoughts are transformed into billboards or constellations that light up the sky ("L.A. Nocturne: Los Angeles"). Word play is not the dominant element of these poems, but the sense of continuity between the contours of language and the subterranean corridors of nocturnal worlds form a seamless universe, where sound becomes light and desire writes on the sky, and the sea is the mirror of the sky. In the well-known poem "Death in Décimas" we can sense the presence of Sor Juana in its form and language and in its questioning of consciousness and wakefulness:

Down the unknown pathways,
through the hidden fissures,
through the mysterious veins
of trunks newly sawn apart,
my closed eyes are watching you
come into my dark bedroom
to change this earthly trapping,
opaque, restless and unfixed,
into a stuff of diamonds,
shining, eternal and pure.

(87)

This is the dreamlike quality of Nostalgia for Death. It is not a diaphanous, free-floating dream state or a mesh of undefined symbols. The dream is in the articulation of very distinct elements, the magic performed on objects as desire transforms the body and the mind.

Villaurrutia's poems are tantalizing. Because they focus on a limited repertoire of images, we hope to decipher a secret. What is the nostalgia for death? Where is the secret link between shadow and light, the sea and desire, sleep and wakefulness? Have we tasted death before and now dimly recognize its constant presence? While we puzzle for answers, Villaurrutia reminds us always of limits—the limits of the body, the mystery of snow, and a "nocturnal angerless sea, content/to lap the walls that hold it prisoner" (55). The pull of the mysteries of death, life and identity are often brought down to earth:

when I find myself alone, so alone,
that I look for myself in my room
the way one looks for some misplaced thing,
a crumpled letter in some corner.

(75)

As Paz reminds us, Villaurrutia makes almost no concession to local color or to a specifically Mexican reality. His territory is the space of paradox and of searching. In Villaurrutia's poetry, death mocks the realities which console us:

".. . These things are nothing, like the countless
traps you set for me,
like the childish sophistries with which you tried
to trick me, forget me.
Here I am, can't you feel me?
Open your eyes; or close them if you prefer."

(43)

This carefully crafted translated edition will give wider access to a poet whose words can still speak to us. In a time when publications of poetic translations are extremely limited, this book gives new hope for a wider world of poetry.