Tatiana Oroño is widely acknowledged as an essential voice in contemporary Uruguayan poetry. I first became aware of her when I was in Uruguay in 2014, looking for poets to include in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. As I met with people, gathering suggestions for this anthology of poets under 40, her name kept coming up as someone—outside the anthology—that I just had to read. On that trip, I was lucky enough to meet Tatiana, who arranged for me to receive a copy of her book La piedra nada sabe. I immediately fell in love with her inventive, experimental voice.
Since then, we have met often and I have translated her poetry, publishing it in US and UK magazines such as Ploughshares, Guernica, World Literature Today, Stand, and the Western Humanities Review. We often meet in Montevideo at the cafe El Sportman across from the National Library, or for tea in her home in Malvin, a neighborhood of Montevideo long favored by writers and artists. I have been lucky enough to read her poems and poetic prose pieces ahead of their publication in her latest books, Estuario and Libro de horas, as well as her book-in-progress, Neblina, or—luckier still—to listen to her read them out loud to me.
Oroño’s subject matter is deeply felt, deeply personal to her, with poems about motherhood, the losses during the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s, and, most of all, the natural world. A passionate environmentalist, Oroño finds her palate of images in nature. She is also a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own. Time and again she writes poems about poetry, poems that reclaim for poetry the power to give meaning to life.
- Jesse Lee Kercheval
Short Fiction | Spanish | Uruguay
September, 2019After an unpromising beginning ("What on earth is this?!"), in recent years the work of Armonía Somers has come to play a defining role in my professional life. Having had her writing recommended to me by a couple of learned friends (neither of whom, it eventually transpired, had read much of her), I picked up a copy of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman, available in English from Feminist Press). Ignoring said initial reaction (a secondary impulse that has served me well in my reading), I persevered and, some way in, was rewarded with that click of connection that will be familiar to readers of all shapes and sizes. From then on, I was hooked.
In probably the most famous essay to date about Somers’ work, the critic Ángel Rama describes her, admiringly, as a weirdo in a generation of Uruguayan weirdos that also included writers such as Felizberto Hernández and Juan Carlos Onetti. Somers, however, was reserved a special place among them, something of weirdo’s weirdo, if you like. And when you open one of her books, you can see why she was afforded the distinction: her writing weaves sinuously from thought to thought, from vivid realism to wild surrealist fantasy, with little quarter given to exposition or, indeed, punctuation. But her perceived difficulty belies a taut sense of purpose. She knew exactly what she wanted to write about, and often this included subjects that few of her contemporaries were addressing at the time: a fierce defense of women’s rights, especially in the realm of sexuality, the accompanying denunciation of male stupidity and viciousness, and wider philosophical, religious, and political meditations that reveal, almost in spite of herself, an extraordinarily erudite and brilliant mind. But perhaps the most salient qualities of Somers’ work are her sense of humor and lust for life, the way she embraces its manifest pleasures and ambiguities with a chuckle or cry of joy. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she has a talent for reaching into the sludge and pulling out whatever she finds has spawned there, be it monstrous or beautiful. Or both.
"The Man from the Tunnel" is a case in point—on a whim, a seven-year-old girl crawls through a sewer pipe, unwittingly headed for an encounter that will prove revelatory in all manner of ways. It’s an excellent introduction to Somers’ work, and one that I hope will encourage more readers in English to seek her out.
- Kit Maude
100 Refutations | Costa Rica | English | Poetry | United States | Uruguay
June, 2018John Manuel Arias is a gay Costa Rican and Uruguayan poet back in Washington, DC after many years. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and bookseller at Politics and Prose. His poetry has appeared in Sixth Finch, the Journal, and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, and his fiction has been published by Akashic Books, the Acentos Review, and Cardinal Sins Journal. Before living in DC, he lived in Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Uruguay
May, 2018María Adela Bonavita (1900–1934) was born in San José, Uruguay and died before her 34th birthday. She published just one collection of poetry in her lifetime, The Conscience of the Suffering Song. One more collection was published after her death. She was plagued by “a nervous illness.” At four years of age, she began attending the odd class in the cultural center “mostly for entertainment,” wrote her brother in the introduction to her second poetry collection, which she'd dictated to him from her deathbed. She worked as a teacher for most of her adult life, setting up a small school in her home where she was beloved by her students. She was also known to create portraits of family members in her spare time, though she’d never received any education on the subject.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Uruguay
May, 2018Circe Maia is a Uruguayan poet, translator, essayist, and longtime philosophy teacher. She has published over a dozen collections of poetry, as well as several books of prose and translations.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Uruguay
May, 2018María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (1875-1924) was a teacher, poet, dramatist, and musician in Uruguay at the turn of the twentieth century. She was known for being simultaneously cultured, charismatic, rebellious, and mischievous.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Uruguay
April, 2018Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. 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.
Victoria Estol was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1983. She holds degrees in sociology and social communication. Bicho Bola, her first book of poetry, and the one from which the poems featured here are taken, has been well received by local literary critics. She earned a commendation from National Pablo Neruda Competition for Young Poets and contributed to the anthology Cualquiercosario, co-edited by Uruguay (Yaugurú) and Spain (Libros de la imperdible).
Novel (excerpt) | Spanish | Uruguay
July, 2013Who Among Us: A Novel narrates the history of a classic love triangle, but with the variation that it is the husband who encourages the wife to take a lover. The novel consists of three parts--three different versions of the same sentimental conflict that culminate in the story each character relates from his or her own perspective. The novel takes place in Montevideo, but this is merely circumstantial; the most prevalent element of the work is the delving into each character's mind, not the monitoring of a social atmosphere. With effective subtlety, Benedetti creates opposing mirrors of the three characters' lives and, at the novel's climax, explicitly asks its underlying question: "Who among us judges whom?"
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Uruguay
December, 2012Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is a testimonial hybrid novel centered on the experience and effects of exile. It chronicles the lives of five family members and the true experiences (for example, health problems) of the author himself interspersed at random along parallel and joining narrative lines. Benedetti uses many points of view (first-person, third-person, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect) and different styles (conversational, epistolary, poetic) along with delayed information and word games.
The novel begins about eight months before the release of Santiago, a militant serving a five-year prison term in the Libertad de Montevideo prison for attempting to overthrow the government, and who, upon his release and return home to resume his family life, discovers the impossibility of resuming any previous personal relationships. Santiago's family members include Don Rafael, his father; Graciela, his wife; and Beatriz, their daughter. Rolando, a friend to all of them, and lovestruck, wanders through the novel, eventually becoming Graciela's lover. They're all Uruguayan, and except for the prisoner, Santiago, reside in what appears to be Mexico City.
Santiago is present in the novel through his letters, which like most prisoner's letters express hope for the future. Don Rafael represents the historical memory of the city of his exile, while reflecting on the wisdom gained by those who are able to live in the present. Graciela, a militant in her own right, feels despair and exhaustion, a sickness of the soul that doesn't have to do with loyalties or treachery, but with the need to be useful and feel alive. Rolando is known as "Uncle Rolando" to Beatriz and offers unselfish and focused support to Graciela, who, although she is increasingly independent, is nevertheless confused or perhaps disoriented by her life. And just like her imprisoned father Santiago, who intervenes in the novel through his letters, young Beatriz does so through texts that could be a form of interior monologue, entries from a diary, or compositions written in school.
Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is not only a magnificent exercise in literary style, lightly hampered by the incorporation of texts that are a bit foreign to the nucleus of the novel, but rather, principally, a remarkable display of patriotic literary courage on Benedetti's behalf. Having been vaccinated against intimidation long before, he wasn't afraid to present several unheroic, weak, and contradictory men and women while knowing that a good portion of expatriates would read the novel with a hypercritical military eye.
(A slightly different version of this translator's note originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review (Issue #48, Spring/Summer 2011))
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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