100 Refutations | Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
June, 2018Cindy Jiménez-Vera is the author of four poetry collections: No lugar (2017), Islandia (2015), 400 nuevos soles (2013), and Tegucigalpa (2012). She has also published a book chronicling her trip to San Sebastián, entitled En San Sebastián, su pueblo y el mío (2014), and a collection of children’s poetry, El gran cheeseburger y otros poemas con dientes (2015). Her work has been translated into English, Italian, and Portuguese, and published in literary and academic journals, anthologies, textbooks, newspapers, and websites across South America, the Caribbean, the US, and elsewhere. For more information, please visit her blog.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
May, 2018Virgilio Dávila (1869-1943) was born in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. Though he experimented with a Romantic style of verse, he is often mentioned as the primary representative of the Modernist movement in Puerto Rico. The influence of Rubén Darío, for example, can be clearly noted throughout his work. He devoted many of his poems to the indigenous beauty of his native island and unique syncretic culture therein. He was widely published by the time he died in Bayamón in 1943.
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 | Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
April, 2018Mara Pastor is a Puerto Rican poet, editor, and translator. Her works include the chapbook As Though the Wound Had Heard (Cardboard House Press, 2017, Tr. María José Giménez), Children of Another Hour (Argos Books, 2013, Tr. Noel Black), and the acclaimed collection Poemas para fomentar el turismo, finalist for the 2013 Premio Internacional Festival de la Lira in Ecuador. Other books in Spanish include Sal de magnesio (2015), Arcadian Boutique (2014), Candada por error (2009), and Alabalacera (2006). Her poems have been translated into more than six languages, and her work has appeared in publications such as Boston Review, 80 grados, Clarín, and El País. Her skill as a live performer of poetry has given her a place in renowned festivals such as Festival de Poesía de Rosario, Argentina; Latinale, Berlin (2016); Festival de la Palabra, San Juan (2015); Festival de la Lira, Ecuador (2015); La Habana International Book Fair, Cuba (2014); and Festival del Caracol, Tijuana (2013). Her poetry has been anthologized in 1,000 millones: poesía en lengua española del siglo XXI (2014), Red de voces: poesía contemporánea puertorriqueña (Casa de las Américas, 2012), and Hallucinated Horse: New Latin American Poets (Pig Hog Press, 2012). Coeditor of the anthology of Puerto Rican contemporary poetry Vientos Alisios, she was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and lives in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
Poetry | Puerto Rico | Spanish
February, 2016Eduardo Lalo's poetry collection Necropolis recollects the memory of trees that were cut down to become pages, words that struggled to recognize themselves on the page, language imputed with the weight of colonialism. Lalo’s reader was not surprised when news broke about the government’s failure to secure an economic future for the Puerto Rico, having already discovered the vast cemetery of Necropolis--the site where an unwritten literary tradition perished invisibly.
Toward the beginning of a poem titled “Unend,” Lalo writes, “I’ve travelled the biggest mall in the Caribbean from one end to the other without buying anything. Unconsumption: liberty.” In March of 2015, Rican merchants coordinated a day of #noconsumo (#noconsumption), closing down their businesses for the day in protest of the government’s attempt to impose a value-added tax. (Can writing be prophetic even if it is already dead?) The day after, a nonprofit called Puerto Rico Reads released a video addressing the governor of Puerto Rico, attempting to explain the precarious nature of intellectual production within an island stuck in the liminal space between autonomy and statehood. The owner of a bookstore called Libros AC speaks to the camera and says, “Without books, we are condemned to be a society of beggars, incapable of competing with the rest of the world in any industry, depending always on those who do have fair access to books.” In the title poem of his collection, Lalo pronounces, “I live in a necropolis / surviving after catastrophe and roving / its illiterate city.”
Are we there yet, then? Are Puerto Ricans living among Lalo’s Necropolis? What is the temporal nature of his anti-utopia? Is it a metaphorical present, or the literal description of a death that happened long ago? Reading these poems now feels like digging, like discovering a prophecy. And so I find myself questioning what I’m doing, what translation can be, if reading means unearthing a cemetery of language.
In the past couple of months, my translation of Necropolis has revealed itself as an endeavor to communicate the significance of these poems by filtering them through the anxious rhythm of the current economic crisis. I’d also like to believe that my work has morphed into an attempt to make sense of what literary stagnation could look like, to understand how the death of books would manifest itself both literally and metaphorically. To learn how to mourn once I recognize myself in the necropolis.
- Maru Pabón
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.
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