100 Refutations | Mexico | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018José Eugenio Sánchez (Guadalajara, México, 1965) is the author of jack boner & the rebellion (Almadia, 2014), suite prelude: a/h1n1 (Toad Press, 2011), Galaxy limited café (Almadia, 2011), escenas sagradas del oriente (Almadía, 2009), la felicidad es una pistola caliente (Colección Visor de Poesía, España, 2004), and physical graffiti (Colección Visor de Poesía, España, 1998). He is a member of FONCA’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In 2006, he was invited by the U.S. State Department to participate in The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, receiving an Honorary Fellow Writer grant. He won the Loewe Foundation’s 10th International Prize for Young Poets. In 2014, he curated the Festival de Poesía en Voz Alta at the Casa del Lago at UNAM. Currently, he performs with his poetry and rock band, Un País Cayendo a Pedazos. Their album, por ahí no es amor (sonido sexofónico), was released in 2016.
Mexico | Short Prose | Spanish
July, 2017These brief pieces, originally written for a monthly column in the Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín, were published in one of Fabio Morábito’s more recent books, El idioma materno ["Mother Tongue"] (Sexto Piso, 2014). I happened upon this book when I was living in Buenos Aires a few years ago, though I didn't intend to translate it at the time. When my partner started reading the book, wondering why I was always carrying it around and laughing out loud, she convinced me to at least write Morábito to see whether the book had been translated into English. Not only did Morábito give me permission to translate the collection, but that was also the beginning of his regular and invigorating correspondence with me about his work.
Much like Alejandro Rossi’s book Manual of a Distracted One, Morábito’s El idioma materno is less a book about one theme or subject and more a demonstration of style and the view of a broad, discerning gaze cast over almost every imaginable subject. Instead of pontificating or pushing some moral stance, these texts provide a critical view of literature, literary professionalism, and imprecise language, and the author does not shy away from critiquing such themes as creative writing pedagogy, translation, and the reading practices of academics, three spaces or roles he himself inhabits. Morábito is a writer who believes in the substantive, in the complex idea, and in the rhythms of long, complex phrases; quirky details, of course, are the hallmarks of his work.
What I most appreciate about Morabito’s prose, however, is his fixation on, and deep love for, the languages we speak and how we speak them: each of the eighty four texts in El idioma materno contains a stylistic lesson, sometimes subtle and other times explicit, and represents the author’s effort to reveal the essence of a subject and its place in the world. The selections published here exemplify the breadth of the book. The essay—to give a name to these prose pieces—“The Sirens,” for example, is more than a retelling of Odysseus’s encounter with the dangerous creatures who enchanted nearby sailors with their music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. By varying the syntax of the same phrase, Morábito not only encourages us to look at the story from multiple perspectives, but also asks us to consider how slight shifts in language can open up new meanings inside a text. The “ominous song” of the sirens in one sentence leads us to the “ominous island” in the next, to the “ominous sirens” followed by the “ominous sea,” and on and on until the wax becomes “ominous” at the end of the text and the snapping point for the crew, “tired now, as we know, of their Odysseus, the calm sea, the oars, the mast, the islands and that beautiful song.”
- Curtis Bauer
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
July, 2017Translating Nadia Villafuerte’s work is a pleasure and a challenge. I am very fortunate that she and I are friends and I can easily ask her to clarify passages for me. This time my particular challenge was finding the character of Micaela’s voice, something with which Nadia couldn’t help me. What a person whose first language is Ch'ol sounds like when speaking Spanish has no obvious equivalent in English. My research took me to various schools of thought about dialects in translation, furthering my education and helping me to make my choice, which was simply to create a dialect rather than to try to copy one in English. “Getting Ahead” is a work of fiction, but it is also a tribute to all the Micaelas who have died and are still dying, many anonymously without even a story to mark that they once lived. Micaela is not a perfect person; although she’s admirable, she’s not even particularly likeable. We can have some sympathy for the abandoned child who is the narrator, but she is also a bit of a brat. And yet it is a joy to enter their world for the little time they have together.
The original story, "Salir Adelante,” has just been published in the anthology Los pelos en la mano. Cuentos de la realidad actual, edited by Rogelio Guedea (Lectorum, 2017).
- Pennell Somsen
Andrea Chapela is the daughter of a physicist and a mathematician, so she naturally studied chemistry. Luckily for me, she’s also a creative writer. The exciting thing about the poems in Fundamentals of Applied Chemistry is that they are a scientist’s exploration of life and relationships through poetry—and at the same time, a poet’s exploration of life and relationships through chemistry! Not only that, but they’re funny, cutting, insightful—and a lot of fun to translate. Ars poetica as lab report? Breakup poem as description of Bond Theory? I’m in. I think I learned more scientific terminology via translating these poems than I ever did in my high school chemistry class! To her credit, Andrea is also a patient teacher and was very helpful in talking me through the structural ideas guiding many of these poems. Though I don’t think intimate knowledge of the laws and structures she references is necessary to reading these poems, her explanations and diagrams were helpful in making sure I translated in such a way as to convey the overall metaphors. Andrea is an accomplished fiction writer, and these poems indicate she has a bright career as a poet as well.
- Kelsi Vanada
Mexico | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
February, 2017The three poems included here are from Arturo Loera’s book La retórica del llanto (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2014). Apart from one poem in the anthology Poets for Ayotzinapa (Mexico City Lit, 2015), this is the first time his work has appeared in translation.
Loera’s voice is always candid. It treads that risky line where “poetic language” becomes difficult to distinguish from common ways of feeling, thinking, and, in this case, mourning. This is hard as hell to pull off. Often, though, it is a mark of good poetry. The imagery draws almost exclusively from the near-at-hand--place-names, regional attire, childhood memories--but is nevertheless rife with ambiguity. The language is plainspoken even as it works full-gear to perform multiple tasks at once. The simplest moments are the most equivocal. Whenever possible, I have tried to create equivalent effects in English.
On the whole I was strict with the meanings of individual words but not above taking liberties for the sake of sound. Example: replacing the Spanish word for “alcohol” with “liquor” in English just because it sounds better coming after “shatter.” There is a strong rhythm, conversational quality, and incantatory pulse to these poems which I hope feels familiar to American readers.
- Garrett Stanford Phelps
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
December, 2016Italo-Mexican writer Fabio Morábito’s patient, nomadic gaze observes the world through the cracks and fissures of everyday life in order to disclose its discontinuities, uncovering along the way the secret lives of people and things. As a geographic and linguistic immigrant--from Italy to Mexico and from Italian to Spanish--Morábito sets his writing in a perpetually liminal space, seeking anonymous points of convergence made possible at the edges and borders of the surface of things. In order to do so, he purposefully displaces himself, tempting the void, as he states in a poem from De lunes todo el año ("A Year of Mondays"), “In order to feel alive/ we must be standing on a kind of desolation.” (All translations are mine.)
Morábito is the rare author who practices fiction and poetry with equal dexterity, and “The Sailboat” is the first story in his fourth collection of short fiction, Madres y perros ("Mothers and Dogs"), published in 2016 by Editorial Sexto Piso. The fifteen stories spring from quotidian situations and places in Mexico and abroad, but his writing soon reveals unsettling enigmas: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; a man’s evening jog on a racetrack turns into a savage battle between runners when the lights go out; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother. The stories leave us with what critic Peio Riaño calls a “deaf question that is never truly answered,” that nevertheless offers new ways of viewing and caring for our world.
I was an ardent reader of Morábito’s poetry before I discovered his fiction and essays. Often-overlooked everyday things and people who are commonly forgotten--for example, a swing set, a group of construction workers, the old pipes running up a bathroom wall, a cow grazing in a field--are given space in his verse to be resignified and to resignify, in turn, the poetic subject and the reader herself. In Morábito’s fiction, this amplified process obliges us to question constructions of order and meaning, and to contemplate the false coherence of systems of knowledge and representation, memory, and narration.
- Sarah Pollack
Mexico | Poetry (excerpt) | Spanish
April, 2016Elsa Cross is a Mexican writer and philosopher, widely recognized as one of the most important voices of her generation. She has produced a considerable body of work that consists of over 20 collections of poetry, books of essays, and translations. Octavio Paz wrote that Cross “is one of the most personal voices in recent Latin American poetry. Her work, already extensive, brings together some of the most perfect poems among those written by recent generations of Mexican authors. I say 'voice' and not poetic writing; although it is written, above all it is spoken. Two opposed aspects are united in Elsa Cross: complexity of thought, and diaphanous diction.”
Bomarzo (from which these poems are taken) is a book-length sequence examining a relationship through the lens of the Italian garden of grotesques built in the mid-16th century by the Italian architect Pirro Ligorio that gives the book its title. Both the imagery and the language used in these poems are ornate and dreamlike, reflecting the phantasmagorical nature of the sculptures of orcs and other creatures which inhabit what is called the "Villa of Monsters," designed to shock and express grief rather than to delight or amuse. And this poetic trip through Bomarzo is metaphoric, not literal, resulting in a nostalgia as much for things that never were as for those that never could be.
For the translation, I've tried to preserve Cross' heavy utilization of Greco-Latinate terminology, to reflect both the location and a certain linguistic extravagance that echoes the Park's eerie beauty.
Relatively little of Cross' work is available in English, although Shearsman Press in the UK has been striving valiantly to redress this. They published a volume of Cross' Selected Poems in 2009, and have just brought out two more of Cross' shorter Greece-inspired collections in a single volume entitled Beyond the Sea, translated by Anamaría Crowe Serrano. A bilingual edition of Bomarzo is forthcoming from Mexican publisher Vaso Roto in 2017.
- Lawrence Schimel
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
June, 2014Using her background in psychotherapy, Glafira Rocha blends genres and fractures forms to introduce us to texts devoid of spatial, temporal, and character delineations, thus fully delving into the psyche of each voice. Like Dan Chaon's Stay Awake and Robin Black's If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Rocha's Such Tales is a work of fiction intended to disturb and unsettle. Spanning nearly nineteen thousand words in length, the volume centers on human conflict, inviting its audience to examine the catalyst for evil that resides in the relationships among the people Rocha depicts.
The situations explored in Such Tales include, among others: a killer struggling to find his keys after murdering a mother and her two children; a psychopath pondering mass homicides; a dying woman experiencing her final thoughts, visions, and hallucinations; two highly driven women competing for power within the same career and the same mind; private letters describing a father's absence, a wife's loneliness, and the incestuous sexual abuse of their child; people wandering around a town vivid with remnants of the revolution for freedom; the loss of a child testing an elderly woman's faith; a paralytic discussing his shoe fetish; a woman living with depression and struggling to move through her day; the brutal death of a relative affecting everyone and no one equally.
- Gustavo Adolfo Aybar
The poems featured here come from a series entitled "El asalto a las putas," or "Whorehouse Raid," which takes up the old film cliché of gunslingers shooting up a saloon and making off with women thrown over shoulders--an event depicted in the second poem. The cartoonishness of this scene is not downplayed, but it is offset and undermined by the poems that bookend it. The title of the poem that precedes it, "far west will never can forget" is meant to be a Spanish speaker's interpretation of English, implying that Wild West tropes are perhaps more alive now in the cowboy landscape of northern Mexico. The poem acts as a forlorn meditation on the waning of the Wild West mythos in the face of urban modernity. In contrast, the final three surprise us by introducing the rarely heard voices of the women themselves as they sit around telling stories that begin in bravado and jest, but fall silent when the tales turn to sexual subjugation. Their tragedy is framed by an epigraph in which Hollywood's idealized Wild West outlaws--Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--weigh in from beyond the opening poem's veil of history, saying "did you ever imagine this butch / no sundance this doesn't smell right to me."
Readers may find it helpful to note that Sánchez finds his footing more in rock and roll than the literary establishment, claiming that he only became a poet because he couldn't be a rock star. He's currently rectifying that with the support of his experimental rock band, un país cayendo a pedazos, which describes itself as "a fresh cocktail of humor, criticism, sex, rock, and performance." To check out their performance of "el asalto a las putas," along with other multimedia fun, go to: http://unpaiscayendoapedazos.tumblr.com.
His newest book, jack boner & the rebellion, will be published in February 2014.
- Anna Rosenwong
Mexico | Spanish | Verse Novel (Excerpts)
March, 2013After being pensioned off for his unstable behavior, Mr. Gordon experiences a fracture of his spirit in an artificial, Californian Eden. In the shade of the tree of a thousand leaves, at the edge of a swimming pool, Gordon transcribes his thoughts, memories, and questions while striving to sort out the harassment he experiences from his wife and his best friend, engaging all the while in a dialogue with an interior voice determined to finish off what remains of his sanity.
Death on rúa Augusta is the diary of a person who cannibalizes his own self. In this narrative poem, Tedi López Mills masterfully delves into the machinery of consciousness in order to exhibit, boldly, that slender thread that keeps us attached to the world. A masterful work of contemporary Mexican literature, which shares both the human depth of Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito and the teasing ambiguity of Johann von Goethe's Elf King, it does showcase one truth at the heart of all human life: No person is to be despised as worthless; no person can ever be deprived of her or his dignity. Even the "zeros" among us are all "classics after our own fashion."
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