Tracto ("Tract") is a tunnel-poem, a poem-stairway, an intimate passageway connecting one darkness with others, the origin of light from whence the poetic word, the very essence of language, is interrogated.
Corona Tallo Raíces ("Crown Stem Roots") represents, through the experience of disappearance--a death in the family, the cutting down of a poplar grove that shaded the river--a radical immersion in the landscape, a harsh geography that joins the everyday traces of life and death.
Cuba | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
April, 2012The featured texts belong to assignments [tareas], an innovative long poem that has as its core the experiences of otherness, both in Cuba and the United States. assignments ponders the impossibilities of a stable identity, its infeasibility in space and time. On a formal level, assignments constitutes an homage to the number 7. It is made up of 21 sections, divided into 7 stanzas, with 7 verses each.
The unspoken cliché that writing should reflect the world in accurate language unveils itself provocatively in Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados's poem "Principle of Uncertainty." Its speaker posits that to perceive something like truth in "unreliable hiding-in-plain-sight / reality" you have to witness, and do your best, because "(the closest) proximity or (furthest) / distance are the error / from which we love or judge."
Another unspoken cliché that the collection Principio de incertidumbre (2007) voices aloud is that poetry can speak the world at all, since writing ultimately is a translation of experience. Principio, Granados's seventh book, whose title I translate literally as "Principle of Uncertainty," wishes to suggest that this is not a treatise on Heisenberg, but rather an experiment with how his principle might work in poetry. Thus, we read the "hurried notes" of an observer faced with the uncertainty of knowing anything precisely. And knowingly, Fernández Granados's free verse of mostly unpunctuated lines that wobble between phrases and across line breaks expresses uncertainty, but in ways that lead the reader into surprising detours and notable arrivals.
In a seeming contradiction to the preceding, a matter of punctuation appears in the ars poetica, "F(l)echas en la noche / D(a)rt(e)s in the Night," which underscores the poet's denial that he can write at all, even while he writes. A parenthesis as lexical item opens a window for the use of the same variable in English translation: F(l)echas - fechas" almost mirror each other, as do "Da(r)tes - dates," with the minor enormity of the lazy "e" in "dartes," hence "da(r)t(e)s," a manuever almost compensating for the size differential between "flechas" ("arrows") and "darts." I have calculated that adding an additional "( )" to bound the "e" could be an intelligible, even an aesthetic choice, though I recognize it is a kind of error.
The real issue comes into focus in the variously stated refrain "no podría escribir" / "I could not write," the resulting clause of a statement contrary to fact: "As if there were in words something able /to translate it." The world, that is, and I couldn't, says the poet. But the implied meaning of such "if" statements is present tense, in other words, the poet "can't write," he can only "transcribe / excavate" what the lyric says in the end: "in the difficult words that are nothing / surely but inseparable shadows hard / ruins teeth or darts in the night / that project things / the singular things of this world..." all clarified in the light of another morning. Even though the meaning of the refrain changes in the course of the poem, I (am bound to) render it as written grammatically, and all the while know that its meaning is variable, uncertain, and significant. Though I have done my best, I am not able to translate it, I can only approximate it.
(W. Nick Hill)
Marco Aurelio Ángel-Lara (Mexico, 1970) is a Mexican writer whose book of aphorisms, El atril de la luciérnaga, was published in 2011 by Arlequín. Marco has been anthologized in collections of Hispanoamerican poetry and awarded with poetry, essay, and short script international prizes. He obtained a Ph.D. in Critical and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has taught philosophy and Latin American literature for several years at different universities in Mexico and Europe.
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
April, 2012As part of a collection of short stories in which each protagonist is presented with the opportunity to evaluate her life by what she has or what she perceives to be missing, "Ursula," occupying the imprecise realm between short story and novella, is a quiet story of the tension in a marriage threatened by personal goals and serves as a strong reminder that the seemingly small decisions are what come to define who we are and have the power to change the course of our lives.
Novel (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2011Diana Blanco is the best "bait" on the Madrid police force, a woman trained to attract the most dangerous psycho-killers. But she is sick of her job and tenders her resignation. She wants to live a normal life, after spending months unsuccessfully trying to attract the attention of the "Spectator," a serial killer who has tortured, mutilated, and murdered more than fifteen women. But when the Spectator kidnaps Diana's sister, she is forced to race against the clock to save her. She doesn't know where to start, and she doesn't know that hidden behind this murderer is a terrifying plot that directly affects her closest friends and family. Diana can't trust anyone--not her mentor, her boyfriend, her best friend, not even her colleagues on the force--if she wants to save her sister and put a stop to the series of monstrous crimes that have Madrid in an uproar.
In 2007, Olvido García Valdés won Spain's Premio Nacional for her poetry collection Y todos estábamos vivos. The book explores life from the viewpoint of death, or the dead, and the intensity of such a perspective. A primary technique for achieving this intensification is what García Valdés calls her supresión de elipsis. This suppression of ellipsis, or intentional exclusion of an element--often grammatical--works in these poems to prevents us from discerning basic narrative elements. Her poetry gains much of its power from omission. We rarely know anything about the viewpoint character of a poem: gender, age, physical appearance seem unavailable. The entire book begins in the middle of a sentence with no implied subject beyond a verb in the third person singular. Often a poem ends with no punctuation. The author also uses white space as the language of the unsaid.
Tedi López Mills was born in Mexico City in 1959. She studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and literature at the Sorbonne. She has published ten books of poetry, several of which have received national prizes in Mexico: Cinco estaciones, Un lugar ajeno, Segunda persona (Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta), Glosas, Horas, Luz por aire y agua, Un jardín, cinco noches (y otros poemas), Contracorriente (Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares), Parafrasear, and Muerte en la rúa Augusta (Premio Xavier Villaurrutia). Her other honors include a 1994 Young Artists grant from the Fondo Nacional para las Culturas y las Artes, a 1995 translation fellowship from the U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture, and, in 1998, the prestigious inaugural poetry grant awarded by the Octavio Paz Foundation. She has translated into Spanish the work of numerous American, English, and French poets and, very recently, Anne Carsons's Autobiography of Red. A selection of her poems, While Light is Built, translated by Wendy Burk, was published by Kore Press. López Mills has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores since 2009.
In a review of El cutis patrio, from which the three poems featured here are taken, the acclaimed Cuban Poet Jose Kozer states that Eduardo Espina is "perhaps the most imaginative living Spanish-language poet" (Letras Libres, 2007). El cutis patrio was originally published in 2006 by Editorial Aldus (Mexico City), and was reissued in 2009 by Mansalva (Buenos Aires). It has been the subject of various dissertations and scholarly studies, including a 2009 book by Spanish linguist Enrique Mallen called Poesia del lenguaje: de T.S. Eliot a Eduardo Espina (Editorial Aldus, 2009). For its complexity and originality, Mallen situates El cutis patrio in the same category as John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and Lyn Hejinian's My Life.
Ecuador | Short Fiction | Spanish
May, 2011Jorge Velasco Mackenzie was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1949. In 1983, he was awarded First Prize in the José de la Cuadra Concurso Nacional. He is the author of the novels El Rincón de los Justos (1983), Tambores para una Canción Perdida (1986), and El Ladrón de Levita (1990); the fiction collections De Vuelta al Paraíso (1975), Como Gato en Tempestad (1977), Raymundo y la Creación del Mundo (1979), Músicos de Amaneceres (1986), and Clown y Otros Cuentos (1988); the poetry collection Algunos Tambores que Suenan Así (1981); the anthology Palabra de Maromero (1986); and the play En Esta Casa de Enfermos (1983).
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).