SOURCE: "Poetry from Latin America: 'The Most Important Harvest of the Times,'" in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring/Summer, 1973, pp. 175-86.

In the following excerpt, Farber de Aguilar favorably reviews Guillén: Man-making Words, praising the artistry and intelligence of Guillén's political poems.

It is unfortunate that [in Guillén: Man-making Words, Guillén's translators, Robert Márquez and David Arthur McMurray], have chosen to label him so quickly as "implacably anti-bourgeois." He is implacably anti-bourgeois; but the epithet is misleading, since about ninety percent of his colleagues, most of them lesser artists, would consider themselves marketable under the same sticker. Radical poets do not generally work in mysterious ways, and books prefaced with these a priori allegations of leftist commitment make me nervous. I always suspect that such political posturings are going to precede some very mediocre verse which I will then not...