Gastón Fernández - Apparent Breviary
Gastón Fernández
Apparent Breviary
Translated from Spanish by
KM CASCIA
$22.00
Bilingual Edition
224 pages
April 22, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-34-5
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
GASTÓN FERNANDÉZ (1940-1997) was born in Lima, Peru. He studied literature and law in Peru, which he left in the mid-1960s, eventually settling in Belgium, where he earned a degree in art history. As a professional scholar, Fernández worked in French. His literary work in Spanish was all but unknown in his lifetime, with just a few stories appearing in Latin American journals. Posthumous publications of his poems and stories revealed a career of great literary significance.
KM CASCIA is the translator of Mexican modernist Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems (World Poetry, 2023). Born in Michigan City, Indiana, Cascia left school at the age of 17 and picked up Spanish working in restaurant kitchens in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Calque and Asymptote, they have published four collections of their own poems and their translations of Latin American poetry have appeared in numerous magazines, including Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous.
PRESS
Gastón Fernández
Apparent Breviary
Translated from Spanish by
KM CASCIA
Gastón Fernández’s hermetic collection of 100 psalm-like poems marks the English-language debut of this legendary Peruvian writer of the late twentieth century.
Fernández lived most of his adult life in Belgium, working as an art historian. While publishing his scholarship mostly in French, he produced literary works semi-secretly in his native Spanish. Shared only with close friends, very few of these works were published in his lifetime. Apparent Breviary is his lone collection of poems, notable as much for their silences as what they say, their use of negative space as a counterweight to speech, and the hallucinatory effect of their sequence.
“Gastón Fernández's poems are deft and booming like trails through a mountain. In KM Cascia’s always excellent translation this book ‘pours: / one word through / another.’” —Noah Mazer
“KM Cascia's careful, attentive translations expand my own pantheon of short-poem gods available in English—Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Russell Atkins—to now include Gastón Fernández. Like those masters of jagged lines and enfolding energy, Fernández enlivens the idea of the hermetic back through its etymology to its shape-shifting mercurial aspect. These poems compress the greatest mystery—call it God or the signified—such that, to enter, it's the reader who must become as agile as mercury, as light as a feather. But prepare yourself, because poems compressed to such density make their own gravity. You'll float like a feather, but you'll come down like a hammer.” —Farid Matuk
“Fernández’s poetry evokes the image of Octavio Paz’s ‘lake of silence,’ that depth from which words would rise, one by one, to become the poem. In both, the same richly populated emptiness, the same musical void.” —Mercedes Roffé
BIOS
GASTÓN FERNANDÉZ (1940-1997) was born in Lima, Peru. He studied literature and law in Peru, which he left in the mid-1960s, eventually settling in Belgium, where he earned a degree in art history. As a professional scholar, Fernández worked in French. His literary work in Spanish was all but unknown in his lifetime, with just a few stories appearing in Latin American journals. Posthumous publications of his poems and stories revealed a career of great literary significance.
KM CASCIA is the translator of Mexican modernist Manuel Maples Arce’s Stridentist Poems (World Poetry, 2023). Born in Michigan City, Indiana, Cascia left school at the age of 17 and picked up Spanish working in restaurant kitchens in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Formerly an editor of the translation journals Calque and Asymptote, they have published four collections of their own poems and their translations of Latin American poetry have appeared in numerous magazines, including Apiary, Circumference, and Anomalous.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
224 pages
April 22, 2025
ISBN 978-1-954218-34-5
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
