Trancendence Towards a New World Translating the Work of German Salas

Abstract

German Salas was born on June 15, 1943, in San José, Costa Rica. Having published and self-published eight collections of poetry between the 1950s and 1980s, including A La luz del silencio (In the Light of Silence 1967), Árbol del universo (Tree of the Universe 1987), and Libro de oro (The Golden Book 1989), Salas has an insatiable thirst for the written word. According to Costa Rican Professor, Dr. Gabriel Vargas, Salas was an assiduous member of El Círculo de poetas costarricenses (1960), one of the “most serious literary
groups of the century” (personal correspondence 2023). Though German Salas published three times with El Editorial Costa Rica—as did many other authors of this group—his name is not mentioned in any of the catalogues or anthologies of the era in which he wrote. These facts lead to the question of why he has suffered relative obscurity in Costa Rican letters.