From the Monastery to the World

The book [Cardenal’s translation of Merton, Poemas] is ready, and now they are only waiting for the illustrations

Leon Felipe is the most interesting case of all—one of the best Spanish poets living in exile.

Laughlin tells me that he is publishing my translation of your Drake poem [“Drake in the Southern Sea”] in the New Directions annual. Along with some poems of Pablo [Antonio Cuadra]. [Robert] Lax will be glad to hear that The Circus [of the Sun] is being printed in Mexico

This is a very grim and terrible century, and in it we must suffer sorrow and responsibility with the rest of the world

Underneath the superficial and somewhat false good humor, with its façade of juvenile insouciance, lie the deep fear and anxiety that come from a lack of real interior life. We have the words, the slogans, the notions

They really like them, and are very impatient to publish the book [Poemas

From the moment I entered the world, and arrived in Louisville, I discovered that the world is truly a horrible and inhospitable place, especially city life in the United States. Life in Mexico, even Mexico City, is still more humane

Nicanor Parra was the great Chilean physicist-poet whom both Cardenal and Merton admired and whose poems Merton had translated a few of

In 1962 he published Original Child Bomb, a long prose poem describing the effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that became an important document of the anti-nuclear movement in those years

The Wisdom of the Desert, a collection of the sayings of the fourth-century holy men who left the cities of the late Roman empire to live solitary lives in search for communion with their God