100 Refutations | Nicaragua | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Joaquín Pasos (1914-1947) was born in Granada, Nicaragua, studied law at the University of Managua, and was part of the Nicaraguan Movimiento de Vanguardia. He wrote plays, poems, and essays, and was occasionally incarcerated for his involvement in satirical work mocking the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García. In Poemas de un joven, Ernesto Cardenal wrote that Pasos’s poetry was “cheerful, like the Nicaraguan people [who], despite all they have suffered, remain always cheerful.”
100 Refutations | Cuba | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Juana Borrero was born in Havana in 1877 and died in Key West in 1896 at the age of nineteen. She was born into a family of intellectuals: her father and all her siblings wrote verses which were later compiled and published under the title Versos familiares.
100 Refutations | Canada | English | Poetry | Venezuela
April, 2018María José Giménez is a Venezuelan-Canadian poet, translator, and editor working in English, Spanish, and French. Assistant Translation Editor for Anomaly (fka Drunken Boat), María José is a recipient of the 2016 Gabo Prize for Translation and fellowships from the NEA, The Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and the Katherine Bakeless Nason Endowment. Published translations include Edurne Pasaban’s memoir Tilting at Mountains (Mountaineers Books, 2014), Alejandro Saravia’s novel Red, Yellow, Green (Biblioasis, 2017), and a chapbook of poems by Mara Pastor, As Though the Wound Had Heard (Cardboard House Press, 2017). Learn more at mariajosetranslates.com.
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.
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.
100 Refutations | French | Haiti | Poetry
April, 2018Marie-Ange Jolicoeur (1947-1976) died at the age of 29 in Lille, France, having already authored four volumes of poetry, Guitare de vers (1967), Violon d’espoir (1970), Oiseaux de mémoire (1972), and Transparence en bleu d’oubli (published posthumously in 1979). According to Saint-John Kauss in La poésie féminine haïtienne, “She was, to the best of our knowledge, after Queen Anacaona, the second ‘cursed’ poetess in Haitian literary history.”
100 Refutations | El Salvador | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Aída Párraga is a Salvadorean poet.
100 Refutations | Essay | Poetry
April, 2018InTranslation is proud to present 100 Refutations, the brainchild of author and translator Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. Over the next hundred days, we'll be publishing a daily poem from one of the countries recently denigrated by the president of the United States. Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. has been working tirelessly on this enormous project, with the help of several collaborators, since the president's comments in January. Her essay describing how she was spurred to action is featured here, with poems to follow in separate posts.
- InTranslation editors
Last September, I responded to a request to help translate a few poems for Dareen Tatour, then in her second year of house arrest in Israel. Since then, her friend and advocate Yoav Haifawi has managed to ferry a few poems out of her house and into my inbox whenever he manages to visit--some small comfort for Dareen as her Kafkaesque trial unfolds, with Israeli authorities warping the meaning of words and gestures to try and prove that poetic expression and a few shared images on Facebook constitute incitement to violence and support for terrorism. Unable to secure a clean verdict, prosecutors have instead prolonged Dareen’s detainment month after month, with no end in sight.
Themes of detainment and repression have been prominent in Dareen’s stanzas since even before her arrest, with a dual emphasis on the plight of Palestinians and the suffering of women in an oppressive society, along with a dedication to express herself despite all the obstacles in her path. In these unpublished poems, which speak to her trial as well as other injustices she has contended with, Dareen warns those trying her of the hypocrisy of their actions, and (perhaps in some distant future) reflects on the toll that the challenges of life have taken from her. As I translated each line, Dareen’s words reminded me not to despair in a world where injustice seems pervasive and remedies often seem beyond my reach--some days there is nothing for it but to produce something that gives us joy, even as we hope for and work towards a brighter tomorrow.
- Andrew Leber
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
March, 2018My collaboration with Spanish writer, poet, and filmmaker Pilar Fraile Amador began through an old professor of mine at Brown University, writer and translator Forrest Gander. In his work as the editor of Panic Cure: Poetry from Spain for the 21st Century, he first discovered an up-and-coming Amador through her poetry, known for its innovative and surreal flavors. After Amador published a book of short stories (Los Nuevos Pobladores, Ediciones Traspiés, Granada, 2014), Forrest put the two of us in contact, and what would follow was a giddy stream of emails bubbling from one continent to the next for over a year. We finally left the technological plane behind in 2016 when Amador accepted a translation residency at the Omi International Arts Center in New York. My visit was short, and aside from translation involved just as much time spent walking together across wide, empty sculpture fields, staring at oddities such as a small house that spun like a barometer in the blustery fall wind.
When reading Amador’s fiction, one might think she lived full-time in such a place, removed from society yet imagining the shadows of daily life strangely twisted, hauntingly similar at the edges of her vision. The small universes encapsulated inside each of Amador’s short stories are as familiar as a word on the edge of your tongue, as comforting as paranoid glances over your shoulder. Her fiction seeks to challenge the quotidian, to shade the expected with sharp, nervous doubt honed on a modern edge. In my translation of her short story collection, which is titled The New Tenants, I strive to embody her blunt style that both entices and discomforts with its casual disregard for convention, its logical jumps that challenge the reader to not just read between the lines, but build a whole world from her constellations. The piece published here, The Island, is a showcase of her unique style and unforgettable poise.
- Heather D. Davis
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