The Unknown Soldier: El Soldado Desconocido

I view as a strange turn of destiny the opportunity to translate this book, a classic in Latin American poetry. It is strange, to begin with, that it was not already published in English, a language, some have speculated, in which it might have been originally written. I do not know of any significant evidence to support this speculation, but it does not seem completely outlandish: The Unknown Soldier originated in the author’s English military experience, and it appears to fit into American poetry of the early twentieth century more than it does into the Latin American poetry of that time-not only because of its theme (the war) but on account of its style. Decades ago, the great Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pachecho highlighted, in the essay that this volume includes as a prologue, that the seminal work of Salomon de la Selva was indeed a starting point for the Latin American literary avant-garde born out of the American New Poetry . It was also strange to discover, as I started the translation work, my paternal grandfather and Salomon de la Selva together, boarding a ship in which the two were forced into exile, accused under the US military occupation forces of being propagandists of Sandino’s rebellion. Every casual encounter is an engagement made beforehand, wrote Borges. May this encounter, which also feels -from a literary and a personal standpoint- like a fated return, be of some utility to the English-speaking reader.