Gloria Gervitz

Gloria Gervitz was born in Mexico City, Mexico, where she lived for most of her life. In 2011, she moved to San Diego, residing there until her death on April 19, 2022. Gervitz studied art history at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico. In addition to writing and leading poetry workshops around Mexico, she translated poetry from English and French into Spanish for publication in journals and anthologies.

Over the course of 44 years, Gervitz wrote what turned out to be her life’s work: a single poem titled Migraciones.Mark Schafer’s translation into English, Migrations: Poem, 1976–2020, was published in 2021 by New York Review Books. Gervitz’s poem is an epic journey in free verse through the individual and collective memories of Jewish women who emigrated from Eastern Europe, a conversation ranging across 2,000 years of poetry, a bridge spanning the oracles of ancient Greece and the markets of modern Mexico, a prayer blending the Jewish and Catholic liturgies, a reclamation through poetry of her own voice and erotic power. Roberto Tejada wrote, “Gloria Gervitz has committed her poetic craft to a lifelong devotion that trembles with memory, as a form of survival. Along the edges of exile, migration, estrangement, and affirmation, her language unites fragility and ferocity, unites voices past and present in the exaltations and sorrows of dwelling.”

Migraciones has been compared to various long poems and lifelong poetic projects, including works by H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Jorge Guillén, Roberto Juarroz, Charles Olson, Diane di Prima, Saint-John Perse, Anne Waldman, and Walt Whitman. As the British critic Luke Kennard wrote, “Migraciones brings to mind the work of Pound and Eliot, both in its philosophical complexity and directness of voice. Often Pound and Eliot are invoked like casual accolades, an ornamental way of saying ‘This is really good,’ but Gervitz shares more than their brilliance. She writes of an emotional, local and universal history—whilst openly and fluidly engaging with the chimera of language and thought.” 

Despite Gervitz’s relative obscurity among readers in the Spanish-speaking world—at least until 2019, when the Chilean government awarded her the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award for Migraciones—critics considered her one of the most significant poets of her generation and her poem a masterpiece of modern Mexican and Latin American literature. The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura characterized Gervitz as “one of the most important poetic voices in Mexican literature,” and Forrest Gander wrote that “Gloria Gervitz’s knock-out body of work, Migrations, is one of the great poems of the 21st century.” The LitHouse podcast of the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, called Migraciones “one of the greatest poetic projects of our time.”

The publishing history of Gervitz’s opus is that of “a poem that grows from me like a tree,” as the author wrote in 1991. From 1979 to 2020, new rings encompassed old ones; limbs and branches emerged from the trunk, replete with new (and old) leaves; and branches—even whole limbs—also fell away over time as Gervitz expanded, revised, and distilled her poem. The seedling of this vast, long-lived tree sprouted in 1976. After six years of composing what she later described as “not even poetry,” Gervitz, in a kind of poetic revelation, wrote the first four lines of what would be published six years later as Shajarit, a 19-page chapbook named for the morning prayer in Judaism. The first eight lines of this text then waited another 25 years, until the 2004 publication of Migrations/Migraciones, when Gervitz finally returned them to their place of honor as the opening lines of the poem. In 1986, Gervitz published Fragmento de una ventana, incorporating and expanding on Shajarit, and a year later, Yiskor, which incorporated and expanded on Fragmento de una ventana. 

In 1991, when the Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica proposed to publish her poetry in a single volume, Gervitz gave this new book, now her only poem, the title Migraciones (Migrations). Commenting on this title in 2021, the poet noted that “the poem has outside migrations, but mostly they’re inside migrations. There were also migrations of myself into other selves, as we’re always migrating within ourselves.” This new title could not have been more apt: the poem proceeded to migrate through eight distinct editions of the “complete” poem over the next 29 years. During this time, Gervitz published four initially separate poems—“Pythia”(1993), “Equinoccio” (1996), “Septiembre”(2003), and “Blues” (2014)—all of which she later incorporated, in full or in part and with significant revisions, into Migraciones. She considered the Spanish Libros de la Resistencia edition, Migraciones. Poema 1976–2020, the definitive version of her poem.

Writing in Letras Libres,Rebeca Leal Singer commented that the “ongoing insertion and removal, that pulling and continuous adjusting, that act of sewing a poem together, letting its fabric expand and be transformed, giving of itself … all of that is play.” Yes, the poet made a very serious pact with her poem and readers never perceive that seriousness. They perceive beauty, play. She keeps changing her poem, and, with each new version, she includes readers in this game. For years, the people who admired her poetry anxiously read through each new version of the text. After a long wait, before which she had said that the poem “was now finally finished,” a new volume appeared, and everything changed again. In this way, Gervitz’s Migrations engages in play and whoever reads it plays too.

Gervitz is both a distinctly Jewish writer and one whose writing challenges and transcends ethnic, religious, national, and literary categories. Her paternal grandparents and maternal grandfather were Ashkenazi Jews who came to Mexico from Poland and Ukraine in the first decades of the twentieth century. Her maternal grandmother, born in the Mexican city of Puebla, converted to Judaism to marry her grandfather. Gervitz’s family was ethnically and culturally Jewish, though not religious. Reflecting on her youth, Gervitz noted that “the Catholicism [my maternal grandmother] grew up with remained present throughout her life. […] I went to a Jewish school, but before then I had a nanny, an indigenous woman who took me to mass. So, I grew up with both things, and in my case, it didn’t present a conflict. … [For] me, it was pretty clear that I was simply Mexican and Jewish—there was no contradiction.” She grew up in the Jewish enclave of Mexico City. In school, her teachers were Bundists, members of a socialist and Yiddish movement founded in Vilna (now in Lithuania) at the end of the 19th century. “I’ll always be grateful to them,” Gervitz commented, “because they taught us the great tradition of Yiddish literature, the importance of the Jews of the Diaspora, and they imbued me with pride in this heritage of Jews in exile, of that farshvotener velt [Yiddish for ‘lost world.’]”

Migraciones is peppered with lines from and references to Jewish liturgy and textual traditions: in Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. The Chilean poet and professor Marjorie Agosín wrote that Gervitz is “one of the most powerful and original voices of contemporary Jewish Latin American literature,” and the Mexican author Ethel Krauze wrote that Gervitz’s poem “is the quintessential example of the recovery of memory of the Jewish spirit, peeled away, layer after layer, over the course of all the many versions of her book. And, like a good Jew, she wrote a single book that, in its own way, is an infinite one.” Gervitz herself thought that the unanswered and unanswerable questions that fill her poetry are “where my Jewish heritage is most present, like the scholars of the Talmud, whose many interpretations are simply questions in another form.”

In addition to being filled with Jewish references and questions, Migraciones contains many Spanish words of indigenous Mexican origin, words and verses in English and Portuguese, and translations and traces of memories from past editions of the poem: words, phrases, and verses in modern Greek; classical Greek; Russian; French; Italian; Japanese; Chinese; Farsi; and Swedish. Mingling with the many Jewish, Mexican, and Latin American references and imagery in Gervitz’s poem are touchpoints for classical Greek, Japanese, and Chinese literatures as well as contemporary English-language literatures: from the Sibyl and the Oracle of Delphi to the figure of Li Po to quotes from the poetry of Blake, Yeats, Olson, and Niedecker. The ground from which Gervitz’s writing sprang, and the roots that nourished it, were partly her personal and family experiences and partly the world of literature, her home and family since her youth. As Jerome Rothenberg wrote, "Like Pound's Cantos or Zukofsky's A, [Gervtiz's Migraciones] is the work of a lifetime; a life's work including not only autobiography and familial memories as a kind of history but rife with religious and mystical imagery from Jewish Kabbalah to Mexican folk Catholicism and beyond. Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long and difficult poem, which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a complex tribute to the complex world from which it comes.” 

From its very first incarnation, Gervitz’s poetry centered on the feminine: a poetry of female experiences and perspectives, feminine voices, and female archetypes. For many years, it appeared set in a pre-male universe. Until the 1996 edition (Migraciones: 1976–1996), in which a single instance of the masculine you appeared in Spanish for the first time, the subjects and objects of Migraciones, whether human (girl, mother, nanny, grandmother) or not (distant one, the Word, poetry) were all feminine, as indicated by the gendered endings in Spanish. Though this changed with the 2016 Paso de Barca Ediciones edition (Migraciones: 1976–2016), when an overtly heterosexual eroticism entered the text for the first time, Gervitz’s poem remained a chorus of exclusively female voices. In 2003, the author described the voice of the book as being the Jungian (female) anima. Eighteen years later, she expanded on this idea with a more personal explanation, saying that “the archetypal mother … [is] really at the center of everything. … Why the woman at the center? Because in many ways, I wasn’t considered worthwhile in my family because I was a woman. To have this female principal as the protagonist of the book, to put it at the center, was for me an act of self-affirmation, a way of claiming my freedom.”

Though Gervitz’s creative production was entirely textual, the author conceived of her poetry in visual terms, starting with her second publication, Fragmento de ventana (1986), particularly with regard to the spatial layout of words and lines on the page. As she commented in 2004, “I am a very visual person … the world enters me through my eyes: lights, colors, forms, objects, landscapes. … So, at times I impart this visual quality to the poem. The way I place the text on the page has so much to do with that visual sense—I think of the book as a visual object.” Gervitz frequently collaborated with female visual artists, incorporating a wide range of artwork in her books,as illustrations (Fragmento de ventana (1986), with illustrations by Rowena Morales; Yiskor (1987), with illustrations by Julia Giménez Cacho; and Blues (2014), with drawings by Magali Lara; as visual accompaniment (Septiembre (2003), with drawings by Magali Lara; as self-chosen book covers by Magali Lara (Migraciones (2000) and Migrations (2004) and Kerro Holmberg (Migraciones: Poema, 1976–2020); and even as part of her poetry itself. In “Pythia” (1993), the three collotypes by the Mexican photographer Luz María Mejía make up Part V of the poem. 

In turn, Migraciones inspired many other creatives, including poets, filmmakers, and playwrights. A variety of dramatic readings and short videos based on selections from Gervitz’s poem have been posted online, including Centro Sophia México’s “‘Migraciones’ de Gloria Gervitz” and a short video by Melissa Nungaray. The Danish actress and director Lene Vasegaard is writing a one-woman dramatic monologue in Danish based on Gervitz’s poem.

Though Gervitz did not consider herself primarily a translator, she rendered into Spanish poetry by a wide range of authors for magazines and anthologies, including Anna Akhmatova, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Rexroth, Lorine Niedecker, Rita Dove, Marguerite Yourcenar, Susan Howe, Clarice Lispector, and Osip Mandelstam. She translated the Russian and Portuguese texts into Spanish from existing English and/or French translations.

Gervitz’s complete poemhas been translated into English, Arabic, German, Swedish, Greek, Norwegian, and Polish, with translations forthcoming in Italian, Russian, and Danish. Selections from Migraciones have been translated into at least 11 other languages, including Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Slovenian. The poem’s popularity is particularly strong in Sweden, where she has been invited to do reading tours on many occasions. The Swedish edition of her book is now in a second translation. The first translation into Swedish of an earlier version of Migraciones sold out twice; the second edition of this translation held the number one spot on the “Best Books of Sweden” list for more than 20 weeks in 2018–2019—a record for this list.

Fragments of Gervitz’s poetry have been published in anthologies, print and online journals, blogs, and literary supplements, including Vuelta, Revista de la Universidad de México, La Jornada Semanal, Diálogos, and Ruido de Sueños/Noise of Dreams in Mexico; Mouth to Mouth, Miriam’s Daughters, Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, Literary Review, Revista Iberoamericana, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, Jewish Latin America, Jewish Currents, and Jacket2 in the United States; El espectador in Colombia; and Noaj in Israel, among others.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Gervitz lectured on literature and led poetry workshops at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, and the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, among other locations, and gave readings around Mexico sponsored by the Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado (ISSSTE). However, by the beginning of the 2000s, most of her readings were outside Mexico: in Latin America, Europe, the United States and in Israel and other parts of the world. Gervitz was the invited poet of the 2003 Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literatures in Boulder, Colorado, and was Mexico's guest of honor at the 2019 International Literature Festival in Rome. 

Over the 44 years of her writing career, Gervitz won three literary prizes, several fellowships, and one grant. In 1986, she won the Fernando Jeno Prize for Fragmento de ventana. Seven years later, Gervitz was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. In 1995, she received a grant from the Fund for Culture Mexico-U.S. to translate the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, and selected translations from this project were later published in literary journals. In 1997, Gervitz became a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Arte, where she continued until 2003. In 2011, she was awarded the PEN Mexico Prize for Literary Excellence. On April 15, 2018, following the publication earlier that year of the (almost) definitive Mangos de Hacha/Secretaría de Cultura edition of Migraciones, the Mexican Ministry of Culture honored Gervitz and her poetry with a panel discussion and a reading by the author in one of the country’s premier cultural spaces, Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Finally, in 2019, Gervitz was awarded the Chilean Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award by a unanimous vote of the jury. Toward the end of her life, Gervitz was mentioned several times in the Swedish press as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

View a bibliographic genealogy of Migraciones (PDF opens in new window)

Biography by Mark Schafer

All quotes from the Spanish were translated into English by biographer Mark Schafer