Читать книгу Conversations with Diego Rivera - Alfredo Cardona Peña - Страница 8

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

A FEW WORDS about my half-brother Alfredo’s background and life as a Latin American poet and journalist might be of interest to the English-speaking readers of this book.

Alfredo, born on August 11, 1917, died before the turn of the century.

We are a literary Costa Rican family on my paternal side, with five of us, in three generations, published writers.

Alfredo’s mother was from El Salvador. My father married her in spite of knowing she was ill with tuberculosis. She died in Costa Rica when Alfredo was about three years old and he was raised by our paternal aunts, Graciela and Odilie, until he went to Salvador to stay with his maternal family and finish his schooling. After a short visit to Costa Rica, he went to Mexico where he became a journalist, married Alba Chacón, a beautiful and bright Zapotec Indian woman with whom he had two children, Alfredo, his son (today a painter), and Cora (a successful actress and theatre director in Dallas).

Early in life Alfredo manifested great poetic talent. In Mexico he found his true home, developed his talents, and went on to write more than twenty books of poetry and prose. An amiable and well-connected man, he knew Spanish poets in exile such as José Moreno Villa and Leon Felipe. Pablo Neruda called his poetry “desbordante y solar” (boundless and solar).

The dedication on the 111th copy of the Rivera book he gave me reads, “To my brother Alvaro, who will translate this book into the English language. Mexico D. F. August 27 / 71.”

It is with deep regret that it is only now, in 2015, at the age of 88, that I have attempted to translate my beloved brother’s work. I dedicate my labors to his memory.