Translated from Spanish by Adam Feinstein. Introduced by Daisy Zamora.
Published 2024. Paperback, 220pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848618756 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Pablo Antonio Cuadra (1912–2002) was one of Nicaragua's great 20th century poets. In this lyrical epic, the inevitable Homeric background for the tale of wandering sailor underpins the contemporary Nicaraguan reality of The Great Lake (Lake Nicaragua – the "sweet sea" of the title), rather than the Aegean. The language is deceptively colloquial, plain even, as befits the real people of his narrative, but he reveals the richness of life on the Lake and makes of the sailors and their families as epic a tale as any that went before. This is the first complete translation of the book.

Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea is one of Cuadra’s most significant works. On one level it looks back knowingly at Homer’s Odyssey , but it also rejects the classical epic in favour of “ something humble or marginal, a primitive or naïve epic with the characteristics of Cifar the sailor, a restless seafarer and impenitent lover with an adventurous and bohemian soul, who played the harp and the guitar admirably – but even with all his exuberant capacity for adventure, Cifar was no more than a poor, frustrated Odysseus, who drowned, like a humble Li Po, on his way back from a party.” Lake Cocibolca, where Cifar’s adventures take place, is the repository of legends, fables, and mythical fictions. Lake Cocibolca shapes the destiny of Nicaraguans, because it is the inner sea, placed in Nicaragua’s breast, placed within its body as in a case of possession. Cuadra compares Cocibolca to a gigantic mirror, a crystal of Nicaragua’s history in which dreams and frustrations are reflected. (Drawn from Daisy Zamora’s Introduction ).

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