100 Refutations | Paraguay | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018Manuel Ortiz Guerrero (1897-1933) was a poet, playwright, and musician. He was born in Villarrica, Paraguay and began to gain some popularity after the publication of one of his earliest poems, “Loca,” featured in the journal Letras. He was the founder of the literary journal Órbita, and his verses were often accompanied by the music of his friend José Asunción Flores. Guerrero published numerous works of poetry, prose, and drama in his lifetime, and two of his books were published posthumously. He was also the composer of the song “India,” which was later declared the national song by the Paraguayan government. He died of leprosy in the company of his lifelong partner, Dalmacia.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish
July, 2018This poem tells the traditional Guaraní story of the creation of language as relayed over the course of hundreds of years. According to Alfredo López Austin, writing in La Literatura De Los Guaraníes (1965), the language formed in this myth by the great Creator is “the future essence of human souls.” Immediately after creating language, the great Creator decides to make the love human beings can feel for one another.
100 Refutations | Canada | English | Poetry
June, 2018An award-winning writer of Cree/Métis ancestry, Marilyn Dumont earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been widely published in literary journals around the world. Marilyn’s first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. This collection is now in its eleventh printing, and selections from it are widely anthologized. Her second collection, Green Girl Dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. That Tongued Belonging, her third collection, was awarded the 2007 Anskohk Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year.
100 Refutations | Essay | Poetry
June, 2018Welcome to the fourteenth and final week (plus two days) of 100 Refutations. For one hundred days, we’re publishing a daily poem from one of the countries recently denigrated by the president of the United States. Lina M. Ferreira C.-V., who conceived and compiled the series and translated many of its poems, has been working tirelessly on this enormous project, with the help of several collaborators, since the president’s comments in January. We’re accompanying the daily poems with a weekly essay by Lina, and the fourteenth one is featured here.
– InTranslation editors
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 | Brazil | Brazilian Portuguese | Poetry
June, 2018Adelaide Ivánova is a Brazilian journalist and activist working with poetry, photography, translation, and publishing. She is the author of several books, exhibitions, and other creative works and is currently editing the anarchist-feminist zine MAIS PORNÔ, PVFR!. She splits her time between Cologne and Berlin.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish | Venezuela
June, 2018Andrés Mata (1870-1931) is considered the initiator of the Modernist movement in Venezuela. His early writing was influenced by Victor Hugo, Nuñez de Arce, and Diaz Mirón, as well as his contemporaries Chocano and Lugones. Julio Planchart, writing in Antología de La Poesia Hispanoamericana (1965), asserted that Mata “belonged very much to his time in his continuous effort to find in his verses a fine and external musicality” and a “vague and internal sentiment which would echo that musicality.” This, Planchart concluded, showed that Mata truly embodied the Modernist movement.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018This canción was published for the first time in the Costa Rican journal El Repertorio Americano, having been translated into Spanish by Don Daniel Alomías Roble, a notable compiler of Peruvian Incan music. Daniel Alomías Roble (1871-1942) is perhaps best known for composing “El Condor Pasa,” popularized in the English-speaking world by Simon and Garfunkel. He was born in Huánuco, Peru to a French immigrant father and a Peruvian mother. When he was thirteen his mother sent him to Lima to study, and under the tutelage of his uncle he took up all manner of artistic endeavors. Eventually he devoted himself to music and the preservation of his Incan heritage, traveling all across the Andes to compile old Incan songs and compose many of his own.
100 Refutations | Guatemala | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018María Josefa García Granados (1796-1848) was one of Guatemala’s principal literary figures despite the many limitations placed on her due to her gender and the customs of the time. She carved out for herself an important place in the poetic scene, publishing widely—first under a male pseudonym and then under her own name—and founding two newspapers. She was a renowned feminist ahead of her time and the co-author of one of the most scandalous pieces of Guatemalan literature, described by many as a pornographic piece of ingenious craftsmanship and superb rhyme, which she dedicated to the clergyman, José María Castilla. She was also the sister of the first liberal president of Guatemala, Miguel Garcia Granados. Because of her many important political connections, she had to flee her country and live in a semi-voluntary exile during a volatile political period that did not favor her brother.
100 Refutations | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018This poem tells the traditional Guaraní story of the creation of the world as relayed over the course of hundreds of years. Here the great creator, Ñamandu Ru Ete, asks one of the True Fathers of the soul-words to make the world, but he refuses because he knows what humans will do to the world and each other. Ñamandu Ru Ete then asks Jakaira Ru Ete to make the world. Jakaira Ru Ete accepts, promising to alleviate with his mist the misfortune that will inevitably befall humankind in the world he creates for them.
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