Exordium

Abstract

As an introduction to Charles Bernstein's first poetry collection in Spanish, his translator traces a genealogy of linguistic procedures in American poetry and other theoretical and artistic sources relevant to the Language poets as well as to those influenced by them. This article offers a contextual and critical companion to each of Bernstein's publications throughout more than four decades. The special attention in the first half to a varying range of conceptual strategies in his books and rhetorical figures in his poems echoes in the arguments set in the second half for the selection and translation decisions made by the author in order to bring Bernstein's work into the Hispanic world.