The most inclusive single-volume anthology of Latin American poetry intranslation ever produced.

Spanning four centuries, this collection features the work of Latino writers from Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban- and Dominican-American traditions and Spanish-speaking countries, from letters to the Spanish crown by conquistadors to modern-day cartoonistas.

Presents a diverse sample of twentieth century Latin American poems from eighty-four authors in Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Spanglish, and several indigenous languages with English translations on facing pages.

An intriguing collection of more than 70 Latin American essays, some never before translated into English, gives us the whole spectrum of concerns that have animated some of the greatest writers of our time--from Andres Bello, Pablo Neruda, and Alfonso Reyes to Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Rosario Ferre--an assembly confident, ingenious, aware.

A comprehensive anthology including historical and critical as well as biographical commentary on each writer's work and on each major period in the literature as a whole. Professor Monegal has organized this gigantic anthology, which reaches from the time of Christopher Columbus to our own decade, on the premise that "Latin American literature is more an idea than an actuality, simply because Latin America itself has never achieved cultural integration." True enough, as the reader of any daily newspaper might guess; but Monegal goes further. His selections demonstrate that it wasn't until the middle of the 19th century, when a late-blooming variety of European Romanticism combined with newly achieved Latin American political independence, that the intention of a Latin American literature was even conceived. Then the letters and journals of Vespucci, Bernal Diaz, and their fellow explorers and conquistadors, with their Renaissance insistence on the fabulous, came to serve as a source for the continental vision of men like Andres Bello, Ruben Dario and Jose Enrique Rodo. Independence movements also produced political divisiveness and a backwater brand of literary realism that prevailed for decades; but in spite of this, the tendency of Latin American literature has been toward the marvelous and the formally experimental, and its most compelling metaphor, from Esteban Echeverria to Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Marquez, has been that of discovery.

An account of the literature of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the time of Columbus to Latin American Independence, this book examines the origins of colonial Latin American literature in Spanish, the writings and relationships among major literary and intellectual figures of the colonial period, and the story of how Spanish literary language developed and flourished in a new context. Authors and works have been chosen for the merits of their writings, their participation in the larger debates of their era, and their resonance with readers today.