New England Literary News. A poetry Project in Boston via Venezuela. By Nina MacLaughlin, Globe Correspondent.

Nidia Hernández, originally from Venezuela and now based in Boston and the director of the multimedia poetry project La Maja Desnuda, invited a number of writers, translators, and poets to translate the work of 90-year-old Venzuelan poet Rafael Cadenas. The anthology, “The Land of Mild Light,” published earlier this month by the Medford-based Arrowsmith Press, gathers a wide selection of the award-winning poet’s work, with translations by Robert Pinsky, Rowena Hill, Forrest Gander, Jon Lee Anderson, Sophie Cabot Black, Carolyn Forché, and others. The poems are intimate, sensual, political. “It is not magic, I have simply forgotten nothing except that I exist / without you,” he writes. The collection, which also includes the original Spanish, offers English-speaking readers a deep look at this Latin American poet. “The light / brings me dead dolphins. / Your scent wins back tumult.” There are lines of quiet power and intensity, like this, an exceptional description of a liar: “He lives amid procrastinations, sharpening his ability to lose sight, overlooking, looking obliquely, hiding evidence, altering the facts, making other versions, adding to everything his dark salt.”