ON December 31 1921 Manuel Maples Arce wrote in Mexico City the first manifesto of what he called Stridentism (Estridentismo), an avant-garde and anti-elitist movement that shared many characteristics with Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Ultraism and Creationism, but with a specific social dimension taken from the Mexican Revolution, and a concern for action and its present.

A few years later, the core of the Stridentist movement had formed. 

It contained poets and writers and many visual artists, including the mask maker German Cueto, painters Ramon Alva de la Canal and Fermin Revueltas, and the photographers Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. 

Most people involved in Stridentism at the time were members of the Communist Party of Mexico. Many were responding to the rapid social, economic and cultural changes that the country had experienced after the Revolution.

Stridentist Poems (World Poetry Books, £17), translated from Spanish by KM Cascia, is the first time the complete work of Maples Arce has been rendered in a bilingual form. 

It includes three of Maple Arce’s seminal works, including one of my favourites, “CITY: Bolshevik Super-Poem in 5 Cantos.”

The Revolution in CITY is protean: a city at one point, a woman at another, then a mass of striking workers or a train full of revolutionary soldiers. Taken as a whole, CITY is a meditation on what Revolution is, what it was in the Mexico of that time, and what was lost, even in apparent victory. 

“I have no hesitation naming it among the finest pieces of communist art ever produced, and equal to the work of Mayakovsky, Modotti, Cortazar and Gorky,” writes Cascia in his illuminating introduction. 

The book, published in 1924, became the Mexican Revolution poem for many. It encapsulates the bravado of the Stridentist movement and its unique revolutionary force: “Russia’s lungs/blow the wind/of social revolution/in our direction./Literary dick gropers/will understand nothing/about the century’s/sweating new beauty,/and the fallen/ripe/moons,/they are that rot/that reaches us/from intellectual sewers.”

Maples Arce, who died in Mexico City in 1981, published many volumes of poetry, criticism and memoir. Still, nothing he wrote in those years had the power and relevance of his Stridentist period. This bilingual edition proves that, shedding light on one of the most progressive literary voices in 20^th century Latin America.

Two Sherpas (Charco Press, £11,99) is Argentine writer Sebastian Martinez Daniell’s third novel.

The book, elegantly translated from Spanish by celebrated writer and translator Jennifer Croft, begins with two sherpas peering into the abyss as they look at the immobile body of an English explorer lying down on the snow. 

Mount Everest is the perfect backdrop for a kaleidoscopic story that deals with post-colonialism, racism and the trappings of the British Empire. 

The fast-paced narrative is told from the perspective of the two sherpas, who, just a few minutes after the Englishman’s fall, will try to decide whether to descend to rescue the doomed explorer, or not. 

“The two Sherpas are then, peering into the abyss. Their bodies outstretched over the rocks, hands gripping the edge of the precipice: lying in wait. Their gestures span the panoply of subtleties that aim to elude both the guilt of the executioner and the indignation of the victim,” the narrator explains in the last chapter. 

The book is divided into short chapters, encompassing Nepal as a place of exploration and conquest, the rise of the Nazis, the characteristics of lichens, Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar, and a strange encounter in a beach resort. 

The sherpas operate as a metaphor for subjugation, oppression and objectification. Their rebellious act of looking gives them agency and empowers them. And, in its momentary stillness, it also turns the experience into a Borgesian Aleph, a point in space that contains all other points in time. 

Like in the famous Aleph, the two sherpas gaze into that timeless ridge seeing everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. 

A fascinating postmodern novel told imaginatively, allowing for multiple interpretations.