Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
January, 2020Paula Abramo’s poetry collection Fiat Lux, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book of poetry by a writer under 40, is a tightly woven cycle of poems evoking the poet’s ancestors, political refugees first from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century, and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico in later eras. At the same time, the book is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination.
I discovered Fiat Lux when Paula and I were both at the Banff Literary Translation Centre as translators (she translates, prolifically, from Portuguese to Spanish). During an evening we devoted to reading our original works, she read one of the poems from Fiat Lux, “In memory of Anna Stefania Lauff, match factory girl,” and its combination of imagery and narrative force blew me away. When I got to read the whole book, I saw how, throughout, the image of striking a match—whether to shed light, or start a fire—forms the hinge between the two themes of the cycle.
In its own unique way, Fiat Lux reminds me of Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulatica, my favorite historical/biographical poem cycle. It’s whimsical, committed, sometimes fierce, sometimes political, and always concerned with words, language, and languages.
I’ve found that I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the book and the poet. In the Mexico City installment of the Words Without Borders feature series on "The City and Writer," writer and translator Lucia Duero, in answer to the question “What writer(s) from here should we read?,” selects a single poetry book by a living author: “Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.”
Translation challenges include switching among the poetry’s various modes: narrative, introspective, biographical, at times philosophical, at times making use of cryptic but evocative bits of ancestors’ journals and handed-down lore. Also, the poet delights in surprising the reader with new meanings that playfully undermine what the reader has just constructed out of the line before, and these shifts need to be made to work in English syntax with equal measures of rhythm, comprehensibility, and surprise. Also, as a classics major in college and a literary translator by profession, Abramo naturally invokes the border-crossing and time-travel involved in telling family history by the use of multiple languages, including bits of Portuguese, Latin, and Greek. Since English is farther from Romance language roots than Spanish is, I have helped English readers by translating some of these phrases, while leaving others as they were.
The poems included here are numbers 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9 in the book, out of a total of 19.
- Dick Cluster
Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
January, 2020Adiós, Casilda! forms Part II of the Mexican poet Ivan Palacios Ocaña's Cosas inútiles y otras poemas ("Useless things and other poems"), published in 2018 as part of the reward for the author's having won the first UNAM Premio de Poesía Joven. Adiós, Casilda! deals with the aftermath of the poet's loss of his pet cat, the eponymous Casilda.
The poems make no attempt to conceal their family lineage: they are nieces and nephews of Frank O’Hara, Erik Satie, David Lynch, and haiku anthologies. They remind us that the pain of loss is tempered by the non-uniqueness of the missing, which is to say: none of us moves through a vacuum, and in returning to the poems and songs that formed those lost to us, we may find them again.
- Noah Mazer
I first came across Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s work while participating in the Art Omi: Writers Translation Lab with Daniel Saldaña París. In between working on the proofs of my translation of his novel Among Strange Victims, our conversations were a way of getting to know more about each other, and when I expressed my interest in using images and text in a form of semiotic translation, Daniel suggested that I should get in touch with Verónica. That introduction not only flowered into a firm friendship but also led to my translating Empty Set, and collaborating with Verónica on various other exciting projects, among which stands out Palabras Migrantes/Migrant Words, which started its life as a bilingual audio guide to an exhibition in Jackson Hole and was later published in book form with images from the exhibition by the amazing Mexican artisan publishers Impronta.
When Verónica sent me Almadía’s beautiful edition of Mudanza, from which the essay “Origami” is taken, I fell in love with its unique movement between personal narrative and the appropriation of the narratives of the other artist-writers whose works and lives the book addresses. Indeed, I remember that I spent an inordinately long time reading the essays as I was constantly either researching its “characters” or stopping to consider what I had just read.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s genius lies in her passion for communication, which has led her to explore the boundaries of language and its interface with the image to open new spaces for expression. As a translator, it is extremely exciting to have the opportunity to occupy those spaces.
- Christina MacSweeney
Mexico | Novel (excerpts) | Spanish
September, 2019Yo, la peor ("I, the Worst of Women") is Mexican writer Mónica Lavín’s 2009 historical novel about the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), who became a nun to enable her writing. Continuing to write after losing viceregal protection, she risked being tortured by the Inquisition. Juana Inés was a brilliant, gifted woman in the New Spain of the 17th-century, a time when most women were illiterate and their education ended at embroidery. Her educated grandfather allowed her to receive basic schooling, which she augmented on her own by using his library.
She became the first great Latin American poet. To find a comparable U.S. poet, we must wait 200 years for Emily Dickinson. The Mexican nun was a female literary pioneer like Mary Wollstonecraft, who published her declaration of women’s rights in 1792 and is regarded as a first feminist in the English-speaking world. Juana Inés complained about the unequal treatment of women a hundred years earlier.
In the novel, Juana Inés is seen through the eyes of other women, those who loved her and those who feared or were jealous of her. We follow the troubles and loves of Refugio, her first teacher; Isabel, her mother; her sisters; Bernarda, a rival lady-in-waiting during Juana’s years at court; Sister Cecelia, a jealous nun who conspires against her; and the two vicereines who were Sor Juana’s patrons, for whom she wrote many of her poems. The excerpts featured here are from Refugio and Juana’s oldest sister, María.
The book is divided into three parts: childhood, court life in Mexico City, and the convent years. Each section is prefaced by a letter written by Juana Inés to a former vicereine, the Marquesa de la Laguna. Those letters are in her own voice, in the language of her time:
"You who have received from my pen evidences of affection and reverence, of my perennial friendship and devotion, give now such lofty evidence of your love for me that it would be impossible for me to match the degree of your gestures of understanding or your strategist abilities to win the battle."
That imitation of 17th century writing—none of Juana’s letters to the vicereine survive—stands in contrast to the register of the rest of the book, like the first chapter included here, in which Juana’s teacher prepares for class:
"Refugio looked out the window at the brightening day, morning fog still threading through the oak trees. So much stillness filled her with melancholy and she yearned for the children’s voices to interrupt her as they trooped in . . ."
Those differences of register and the distinctive perspectives of the numerous narrators are chief among the challenges in translating this novel.
- Patricia Dubrava
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
June, 2018Gabriel Cantú Westendarp has published five collections of poetry, including Naturaleza muerta (2011); Poemas del árbol (2009); El filo de la playa (2007); El efecto (2006); and Material peligroso (2015), in which these poems appear. She has also published a novel called Hamburgo en alguna parte (2016). She won the Ramón López Velarde National Poetry Prize in 2012 for Material peligroso (2015). She also co-founded the magazine Otra Orilla and works at the Metropolitan University of Monterrey.
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018Briceida Cuevas Cob was born in Tepakán, Campeche, Mexico. From 1992 to 1994, she was part of the Maya poetry workshop in the Casa de Cultura de Caliní run by Walderman Noh Tzec. Her work has been widely published and anthologized. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, and in 2010 she became Artistic Creator in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
June, 2018Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-1695), or as she is better known, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a self-educated poet, philosopher, and composer during the colonial period in Mexico—then called the territory of New Spain. She was fluent in Latin and Nahuatl in addition to her native Spanish. She is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the period, not merely within the Mexican or Hispanic American traditions, but in the entire Spanish-speaking world. She was forced to join a nunnery in her late teens by her own confessor and later lifelong antagonist the Bishop of Puebla. In a letter years later she would recall this, writing, “If you had known I was to write verses you would not have placed me in the convent but arranged my marriage.” The cloistered life afforded her time, access to books, and a cell of her own, and thus it became her most prolific period. The poetry she composed there would make her famous in the world well beyond the convent walls, and allow her to reel the world back into those walls, receiving many visitors and admirers and earning the protection and patronage of the viceroys of De Mancera, the archbishop viceroy Payo Enríquez de Rivera, and the marquises de la Laguna de Camero Viejo. Her work has long been honored by the Mexican government, and her life and works have inspired numerous authors, composers, and filmmakers. Carlos Fuentes once called her "the first great Latin American poet." She died at age 43 of an unknown plague while caring for a sister of her religious order, shortly after writing the now-famous letter to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the pen name for the Bishop of Puebla.
100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Jeannette L. Clariond is a poet, translator, and editor. Her published collections of poetry include Mujer dando la espalda (finalist for the Ramón López Velarde National Poetry Prize, 1992); Desierta memoria (winner of the Efraín Huerta National Poetry Prize, 1996); Todo antes de la noche (winner of the Gonzalo Rojas National Poetry Prize, 2001); Leve sangre, Marzo 10, NY (performed in Madrid using dance and music); 7 visiones (with Gonzalo Rojas); and the retrospective anthology Astillada claridad (UANL, 2014). She is also the author of the prose memoir Cuaderno de Chihuahua (Fondo de Cultura Económica). In 2003, Clariond founded the publishing house Vaso Roto Ediciones, which she has directed since then. She was awarded a Fundación Rockefeller-Conaculta grant in 2004 for her translation of Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac, a BANFF Translators Grant in 2004 for The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of North American Poetry (co-edited with critic Harold Bloom), and recognition from the Italian Institute for Culture in 2008 for her translations of the poet Alda Merini. For her poetry and her contributions to translation and culture, she was awarded the Juan de Mairena Prize by the University of Guadalajara in 2014.
100 Refutations | Mexico | Song lyrics (excerpt) | Spanish
May, 2018100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Rocío Cerón is one of the foremost poets and performance artists of her generation. Her work enacts a dialogue between languages and combines poetry with sound experimentation, performance, and video to create spaces of transcreation. Her volumes of poetry include Basalto (2002), Imperio/Empire (2008), Tiento (2010), Diorama (2012), and Borealis (2016). Her poems have been translated into many European languages.
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).