Thank you Ida for being you, for your restrained and necessary poetry, for that Uruguayan memory that fills this cold apartment in Paris with birds.

— Julio Cortázar
Ida Vitale

Ida Vitale

Ida Vitale was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1923. She is one of Latin America’s most celebrated and respected poets. Vitale has published over thirty works of poetry, prose, and literary criticism, in addition to numerous translations. In Uruguay and Mexico, where she lived in exile, she was an important intellectual figure. In the late 1980s, Vitale settled in Austin, TX until her return to Montevideo in 2016, after the death of her husband. She is the fifth woman to win the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the highest accolade in Spanish. Her awards include the National Prize in Uruguay, the Reina Sofía Prize, the Octavio Paz Prize, the García Lorca Prize, and the Max Jacob Prize. In 2019, the BBC named her one of the world’s 100 most influential women

cover image of the book Time Without Keys

Time Without Keys

by Ida Vitale

Translated by Sarah Pollack

“Like this bird / that waits until the light dies / to begin singing, / I write in darkness, / when nothing shines / and calls out from the earth.”

The celebrated writer Álvaro Mutis envied new readers of Ida Vitale’s poetry: “unexpected pleasures await them.” Time Without Keys: Selected Poems is the first volume of Vitale’s illustrious poetry to appear in the US. The selection spans seventy-five years and the wonders within abound—the skies over Montevideo, falconry, the saxifrage’s bloom, gratitude for the alphabet and for summer—as do urgent questions about our relationship with the world. How does our perception of time shape history, as well as our social and political constructs? Vitale’s poetic and human vitality have made her a storied figure in the Spanish language and beyond; her writing is revered for being classic and modern, precise and lucid, intellectually challenging and rich in tradition. This bilingual edition, presented in reverse chronological order, offers the reader a wide range of Vitale’s most beloved poems as well as a wealth of recent work. The translator Sarah Pollack, Vitale’s first translator into English, has written an informative afterword about Vitale’s life and work.

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Thank you Ida for being you, for your restrained and necessary poetry, for that Uruguayan memory that fills this cold apartment in Paris with birds.

— Julio Cortázar

A poet drawn toward things that take flight, like birds and words… Vitale relishes the movement of relinquishing something, treating the act of such surrender not like a loss, but like a gain in weightlessness.

— Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books
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