Sentimental Songs: La Poesia Cursi

Alfau (National Book Award nominee for Chromos ) continued to write poetry in his native Spanish even after immigrating to New York in 1916. This bilingual edition of his collected poems begins with the epigraph: ``I am a Romantic, and that's why / I make fun of Romanticism.'' The most successful poems of this collection do just that. Some criticize the 19th-century literary movement directly, as in ``Romanticism,'' which disparages the ``suicidal spirit'' of such writers as Wordsworth and Becquer. Alternately, Alfau mocks Romanticism by imitating its tone, as in ``Urban Youth,'' where he recalls ``days of wine and roses: / wine, turned sour with the years; / roses . . . now thorns amid the rubbish.'' At times, however, such works seem more to embody sentimentality than to mock it, as in ``Thought'': ``Oh to be a drop of rain / and in happiness, a smile!'' Overall, as rendered in Stavans's faithful if workmanlike translation, the collection is provocative, often sardonic and sometimes beautifully lyrical. There are also surprises, such as ``Afro-Ideal Evocation,'' an appeal to a black urban dandy that in places evokes the work of Marcus Garvey. (June)