In Professor Barrero’s bilingual anthology, “De otra mannera” (“Otherwise”), he has translated into Spanish the poetry of Jane Kenyon. He says he chose this title because it is the title of one of Kenyon’s most popular poems.
Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the Midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. While a student at the University of Michigan, Kenyon met the poet Donald Hall; though he was some twenty years her senior, they married in 1972 and moved to Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. Kenyon was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died of leukemia in April of 1995.
Four collections of Kenyon’s poems were published during her lifetime: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978). She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English (published as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985), and she championed translation as an important art at which every poet should try his/her hand. When she died, she was working on editing Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, which was released posthumously in 1996.
Barrero’s bilingual anthology has 61 of the most outstanding poems of Jane Kenyon’s. The poems represent the human, aesthetic and spiritual side of the poet. Starting with “By the night”, the first poem of her first book, From Room to Room which included poems as popular as “The Suitor” and “The shirt”:
The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
From her second book, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Barrero selected some descriptive poems like “The Pond at Dusk” and “Evening Sun”, depressive’s poems as: “The Sandy Hole” and “Depresión” and domestic poems as “Wash” and “Alone for a week”. From “Let Evening Come” he incorporated poems that belong to the world that surrounded her, including the one that gives name to the book and has become one of the most famous of her poems:
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
From Constance, her fourth book, Barerro selected “The Potato”, “Coats”, “Peonias at Dusk”. Otherwise is another poem that is included and belongs to the book with the same title. The poem is a prophetic and emblematic document and perhaps her best known poem. Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, includes 20 poems Kenyon wrote just prior to her death as well as several selected by Donald Hall from earlier collections. Notable for their intimacy and technical control, the poems illuminate Kenyon’s daily struggle with depression and her alertness to grace and comfort in the presence of despair. With more than 75,000 copies in print, the volume remains a bestseller. Published 10 years after her death, the Collected Poems contains all of Kenyon’s published work, including her translations of Anna Akhmatova.
“Kenyon’s poems are filled with rural images: light streaming through a hayloft, shorn winter fields. She wrote frequently about wrestling with depression, which plagued her throughout her adult life. Though a subtle faith permeates her poems, they are not overtly Christian, though her essays reveal the important role church came to play in her life once she and Hall moved to Eagle Pond Farm”
The poetry of Kenyon is precise and transparent, it resolves enigmas, comforts us, makes our lives lighter and carries us to a sheltered place.
Her poem “Let Evening Come” was featured in the film “In Her Shoes,” in a scene where the character played by Cameron Diaz reads the poem to a blind nursing home resident.
Hilario Barrero was born in Toledo, Spain and has been living in New York for the last 29 years. He received his doctorate in the Department of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures at CUNY. He has taught at BMCC and Princeton as an adjunct and subsequently came full time to BMCC five years ago. Presently, he is an Associate Professor in the Modern Languages Department. He was recently awarded the Feliks Gross Endowment Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement.
