Gloria Gervitz
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Gloria Gervitz, poet and translator, was born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents in Mexico City. She is best known for her book-length poem, Migraciones (Migrations), which she wrote over 44 years, and which has been translated into English by Mark Schafer. Migraciones explores the experiences and inheritances of Jewish women in Mexico, and is widely considered a masterpiece of modern Latin American literature. Although she lived most of her life in Mexico City, Gervitz moved to San Diego, California, where she died in 2022.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Gervitz’s poem Migraciones is an epic reflection on millennia of Jewish experience. Author Ethel Krauze has commented that this book-length poem “is the quintessential example of the recovery of memory of the Jewish spirit, peeled away, layer after layer…. [Like] a good Jew, [Gervitz] wrote a single book that, in its own way, is an infinite one.”
For extensive comments on Gervitz’s work and its Jewishness, see her profile in the Jewish Women’s Archive.
Published Works
Migraciones 1976-2020 (Universidad Iberoamericana and Mangos de Hacha, 2024)
Migrations: Poem, 1976-2020, translated by Mark Schafer (New York Review of Books, 2021)
Links to Sample Works
Poetry Magazine: From Migrations, translated by Mark Schafer
Education
Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City