Suppose that after Emily Dickinson’s death her poems had not been rescued from their hiding place in her bureau drawer. Suppose that Max Brod had followed Franz Kafka’s instructions to burn all of his manuscripts. Providentially, these two indispensable lifeworks were saved for posterity. But isn’t it possible that the works of other authors, equally self-effacing and equally irreplaceable, could be – already have been – lost to us for lack of decisive intervention? In an age as obsessed as our own with commerce and celebrity, when volumes of information are dispersed at unheard-of speeds, the highest art may easily be drowned in the tumult.

The poetry of David Rosenmann-Taub rises above both topical events and poetical fashions. In verses bursting with audacious fantasy, furious wit, and tragic insight, he presents a radically original vision of consciousness, nature, and metaphysics. Now in his seventies, he has always applied himself entirely to the creation of his poetry and not at all to its promotion. What Valéry said of Mallarmé – that he was “the purest writer ever to hold a pen” – might also be said of Rosenmann-Taub. Only an artist so indifferent to the marketplace could produce work of such uncompromising rigor. When published in its entirety, his oeuvre will amount to some forty-seven volumes. Taken together, they will comprise a vast, integral masterwork by one of the deepest thinkers of our era – probably the most comprehensive cosmology in poetry since Dante’s Commedia.

Three of Rosenmann-Taub’s books were introduced by a prestigious publisher in his native Chile nearly half a century ago and are long out of print. Another five came out in limited editions. The rest of Rosenmann-Taub’s poetry remains unpublished. Only recently has his work
begun to be rediscovered. In 2002, laudatory articles began to appear in major Chilean publications, and one of the country’s leading literary publishers, LOM Ediciones, brought out a new edition of Rosenmann-Taub’s classic Cortejo y Epinicio as the first in a series of his books that it plans to issue. In 2003, LOM then published the first edition of El Mensajero. However, the world at large has yet to learn that his poetry exists.