100 Refutations | Peru | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018José Santos Chocano was a prolific poet and political activist considered to be a leading figure of the Latin American Modernism movement. In 1922, Chocano was recognized by the Peruvian government as poet laureate.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
April, 2018Claritza Maldonado, better known as Clari (as stated by her gold cadenita), is a creative writer, poet, and researcher from Chicago. She holds a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Latina/o Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a graduate student at Brown University in the American Studies PhD program with a Public Humanities focus. Her poetry has been published at the Wanderer Poetry literary website. Her research and creative writing purposefully overlap by way of language and content. Broadly, her research interests include cultural studies, media studies, performance studies, and Latina/o literature. As an aspiring curator/educator, she aims to situate her work between cityscape and island, intermingled with Spanglish. Her poems are stories of familia, history, conversation, observation, cultura, and resistance.
The poem featured here was first published in Puerto Rico en Mi Corazón, a collection of broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets printed by Anomaly Press and available for purchase on Etsy.
100 Refutations | Nicaragua | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, better known as Rubén Darío, was born in the city of Metapa, Nicaragua (now known as Darío City) in 1867. He was a poet, journalist, and diplomat, as well as the leading figure of the Latin American Modernist movement. He is often referred to as “el príncipe de las letras castellanas.”
100 Refutations | Colombia | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Irina Henríquez is a poet and film producer from Colombia with a degree in humanities from the University of Cordoba in Montería, Colombia. She leads the Manuel Zapata Olivella literary workshop at the University of Montería, has produced numerous award-winning short films, and is the author of A Riesgo de Caer from Ediciones Corazon de Mango. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Spain, and her work has been translated into English and Portuguese.
100 Refutations | Dominican Republic | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Salomé Ureña was born in Santo Domingo in 1850. She was the daughter of lawyer and writer Nicolás Ureña de Mendoza and Gregoria Díaz de León. She was exposed to great literature from a very early age, as her father taught her the classics of both French and Spanish literary traditions. This was crucial in shaping Ureña’s own aesthetics and stylistic choices later in life. From adolescence onward, she could recite full passages of literature in Spanish, French, English, and Latin. She began writing verses at the age of fifteen and published her first works at the age of seventeen. Her later work was marked by nostalgia and patriotism. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 46 and was buried in the church of Nuestra Señora las Mercedes.
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Krisma Mancía was born in El Salvador in 1980. She has studied literature at the University of El Salvador, theater at La Escuela Arte del Actor, and sculpture and ceramics at the National Center of the Arts in El Salvador. She has also participated in the workshop La Casa del Escritor of El Salvador under the tutelage of Rafael Menjívar Ochoa. She is the author of La era del llanto, from Colección Nuevapalabra, published under the DPI imprint (Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos); Viaje al Imperio de las Ventanas Cerradas, which was awarded first place in the international La Garúa prize for young poetry and was published in 2006 by La Garúa Press in Barcelona, Spain; Nueva Cosecha, with Editorial Casa de Poesía de Costa Rica; and Pájaros imaginarios y trenes invisibles entre tu ciudad y la mía, edited by Valparaíso de España and published by the Editorial Municipal de la Alcaldía de San Salvador. For more poetry and information, please visit https://krismatica.wordpress.com.
100 Refutations | Costa Rica | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Mauricio Molina Delgado is a Costa Rican poet and accomplished academic. He holds degrees in statistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy, and psychology and has studied at the University of Costa Rica and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. As a poet he has received numerous awards, including the Editorial Costa Rica award in 2003. He currently works as a professor and researcher at the University of Costa Rica.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Uruguay
April, 2018Delmira Agustini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1886. She was a precocious writer and showed incredible talent from a very early age. She belonged to the “generación de 1900” and stood out as one of the few women poets in the Latin American Modernist movement, earning the admiration of some of the most acclaimed writers of the time (Miguel de Unamuno, Manuel Ugarte, and Rubén Darío, among others). Her writing was marked by a unique eroticism rarely displayed by women writers of the period.
100 Refutations | French | Quechua | Spanish | Verse drama (excerpts)
April, 2018Over the years there has been debate regarding the true origins of this play, whether certain similarities with European theatrical structure (e.g a “fool,” three acts) reveal a forgery, coincidence, interference by a translator, or a colonial rewrite which infused an older text with new European influences. Many continue to maintain that it remains one of the few and last Incan dramas, and its appearance in Peru in colonial times may make it a vital part of early American literature, regardless of its mixed heritage.
According to F. Pi y Margali (Madrid, 1885), Ollántay is a play “in Quechuan verse from the time of the Incas, […] one of the few literary compositions left from the ancient Americas. It is written in Quechua, the language of the Incas, […] there is nothing in it that reveals European thought or feeling, nor anything in it that does not fit the institutions, the customs, and the social state of that vast empire […] which extended from shores of the Ancasmayu to those of the Mauli.”
The play, writes Jorge Basadre in Literatura Inca (1938), is named after its protagonist, Ollántay, a great military leader who, for his courage and despite being a member of the lower classes, has been raised far, far above his station. Not far enough, however, to be able to pursue his beloved, the king’s daughter, who is forbidden to mix her royal blood with that of a mere commoner, regardless of love or valor.
Ollántay was initially translated into French by Gabino Pacheco Zeguerra. The Spanish translation was undertaken by G. Madrid in 1886.
100 Refutations | Argentina | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Alfonsina Storni was serendipitously born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland in 1892 during a brief family trip abroad. She is considered one of the foremost poets in all of Latin American literature. She had to earn a living from a very early age and worked as a traveling actress at the age of thirteen, later as a school teacher at nineteen, and as a salesgirl in Buenos Aires until the age of twenty-five. Her luck changed after the publication of her first book, which rightfully received wide acclaim. According to the Antologia de la Poesia Hispanoamericana, she spoke alongside Gabriela Mistral and Juana de Ibarbourou at a 1938 event hosted by the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública de Urugay. That same year, at the age of 46 and knowing herself to be incurably ill with breast cancer, Storni committed suicide in Mar del Plata, Argentina.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).