This is Jacket 12, July 2000   |   # 12  Contents   |   Homepage   |   Catalog   |

IN DECEMBER of 1940 Jorge Carrera Andrade stepped ashore in America at the port of San Francisco, California. Appointed as Ecuadorian Consul General to the United States, Carrera Andrade had just spent four years in Tokyo as a militarized Japan swept through Asia and Indochina. In the past year Belgium, France, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Norway had fallen to the Germans. In December of 1940 the Luftwaffe had begun its bombing campaign of Britain. Dark war clouds increasingly loomed on the American horizon.

Carrera Andrade’s first period in the United States was to last four years. As he had always done in whatever city he was posted to, Carrera Andrade continued his active literary life. In California he met and became close friends with Spanish poet in exile Pedro Salinas. During those four years in San Francisco he engaged in extensive literary correspondences with many American writers, including John Peale Bishop, John Malcolm Brinnin, Dudley Fitts, H.R. Hays, John Hershey, Muna Lee, James Laughlin, Seymour Lawrence, Thomas Merton, Archibald MacLeish, Wallace Stevens, Donald Walsh, and William Carlos Williams. It is also worth noting some of his international correspondents around the same time: Jaime Torres Bodet, Eugenio Florit,prima classe alviero martini offerte, Carlos Fuentes, Yvan Goll, Jorge Guillen, Nicolas Guillen, Juan Liscano, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Pellicer, Edouard Roditi, and Jules Superville.

In 1942 James Laughlin’s New Directions Publishers published a massive anthology of Latin American poets. Under the editorship of Dudley Fitts it weighed in at over 500 pages and was the first comprehensive anthology of Latin American poets to be published in English. In its pages American readers gained their first significant glimpses of Carrera Andrade, Miguel Angel Asturias,Louis Vuitton Antheia, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Carlos Drummond de Andrade,borsa alviero martini, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Cesar Vallejo.