Roberto Juarroz (Coronel Dorrego 1925-1995 Temperley) was an Argentine poet famous for his "Poesía vertical" (Vertical poetry). He published fourteen volumes of poetry in all, numbered successively 1 to 14, under the general title "Poesía vertical", the first appearing in 1958 and the final one posthumously in 1997. A fifteenth volume was edited by his wife, the poet and critic Laura Cerrato, and published after his death. W.S. Merwin published a bilingual selection of Juarroz' poems in 1977 (Kayak Books) which was re-issued in an enlarged edition in 1987 (North Point Press), both volumes entitled Verical Poetry. In 1992 Mary Crow published her translations of the later work as Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems (White Pine Press), which won a Colorado Book Award. All of these books are now out of print. In 2011 her translations of a selection of his final poems will appear as Vertical Poetry: Last Poems (White Pine Press).
The poetry of Juarroz is spare and sometimes cryptic, with lines such as "busco las espaldas de Dios" ("I seek the back of God").
Octavio Paz wrote: Each poem of Roberto Juarroz is a surprising verbal crystallisation: language reduced to a bead of light. A major poet of absolute moments. For Julio Cortázar, Juarroz's poems included both the most elevated, and most profound, written in Spanish in recent years.
| El silencio que queda entre dos palabras | The silence that lingers between two words |
| no es el mismo silencio que envuelve una cabeza cuando cae, | is not the same silence that surrounds a head that falls, |
| ni tampoco el que estampa la presencia del árbol | nor that which marks the presence of a tree |
| cuando se apaga el incendio vespertino del viento. | when the wind's evening fire at last stills. |
Juarroz, Roberto. Vertical Poetry, trans. by W.S. Merwin. Kayak Books, 1977. ISBN 0-685-67046-5. Enlarged edition, "Vertical Poetry," trans by W. S. Merwin, North Point Books, 1988 ISBN 0-86547-307-2.
Juarroz, Roberto. "Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems," trans. by Mary Crow. White Pine Press, 1992. ISBN 1-877727-08-3.
Juarroz, Roberto. "Vertical Poetry: Last Poems," trans. by Mary Crow. White Pine Press, 2011.
Individual translations of poems in many anthologies, including "The Vintage Book of World Poetry" and "The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry," and literary magazines, including Salamander, Literal: Latin American Voices, Seneca Review, Hawai'i Review, and Visions International.