Selected Poems

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon, Patrick Madden, and Steven Stewart. Edited by Antonio Ochoa. Eduardo Milán was born in 1952 in Rivera, Uruguay, a small city that shares a street with the city of Santana do Livramento in Brazil. He lost his Brazilian mother when he was only a year-and-a-half old. As a teenager his father sent him to live in the countryside, an experience that transformed the shy boy into a confident young man. During the repressive military dictatorship of the 1970s and '80s his father was arrested for his involvement in the national resistance movement known as the Tupamaros. He was given a twenty-four-year prison sentence. The name of the prison where he was sent was Libertad (Freedom). After living in fear for several years following his father's arrest, Milán went into exile in Mexico in 1979 where he still lives, in a white house with a fig tree in the garden. From the late '80s to the early '90s he wrote a column on contemporary Latin American poetry for the journal Vuelta, which was directed by Octavio Paz. In 1997 he was awarded one of the most prestigious poetry awards in Mexico, the Aguascalientes prize, for his book of poems Alegrial. This volume is the first significant selection of his work in English.