I want to start by reading some translations from a book
that I didn't think had been published.
And was put in my hands by the publisher George Hitchcock,
who's also very fond of Tucson and coming here, just a couple
of weeks ago it's a book of translations
of poems by Roberto Quiroz, who's an Argentine.
A poet about whom I don't know very much.
I know that he's a man in his 50s.
And he's published five books of poems.
The first was called First Vertical Poetry.
And the second was called Second Vertical Poetry.
And the third was called Third Vertical Poetry.
And I made a selection from the five books
and called it Vertical Poetry.
I didn't know anything about him.
And I'm amazed to find that he's as little known as he is.
Nobody seemed to have heard anything
about Roberto Eduardo's a few years ago.
And I thought he was very good when I read in one or two poems
and wrote off and got the rest of his books
and started traveling around with them in my pocket.
And little by little, they began to transfer themselves
to the margin in English.
And so that's how this book got together.
There's an epigraph for all of the poems at the beginning
of the first vertical poetry, which was published
in sometime in the 50s.
I don't remember exactly when.
I don't know.
But I think that the epigraph is an ironic allusion
to a fragment of Heraclitus.
And as I'm a Heraclitus addict myself,
I was very interested by this.
There's a fragment of Heraclitus anyway.
That goes the way up and the way down are the same.
As with almost all of the fragments of Heraclitus
is one of the mysterious things about it is
and what doesn't even know whether it's a fragment.
I mean, it may be the whole thing.
And the Heraclitus felt that this was worth several volumes.
As indeed, it has proved to be worth several volumes
of philosophical discussion back and forth.
But anyway, there's this little also very mysterious,
three-line poem of Juarroz.
This is an epigraph to all of them, which goes--
and they're all untitled--
"going up is only a little shorter or a little longer
than going down."