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full length literary translations

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String Theory

fall 2024

Cardboard House Press

by Karen Villeda. Winner of Mexico's 2018 Gilberto Owen National Prize for Literature. A book-length autobiographical poem interrogating the act of suicide from an intimate perspective: the death of the author's aunt, after whom the author is named, three months following the author’s birth. Co-translated with NAFTA.

Excerpted in Folder

Advanced praise

One step forward, one back, Karen Villeda braids poem-structures that string her readers along, pick us up, let us spin, poke at our stitches, rope us in, knot us, and won’t release us. With relentless meticulousness, her String Theory disentangles the present-absence of a woman, the sister of a parent, a life extinguished before Villeda was able to speak and understand. Yet she bears her name. We witness the poet’s testimony to this absence, to a nothing, an un-thing, thought and thinking, until it is truly something. Something testy, testing, tessellating, that refuses to rest in mere testimonial. Someone. And the translation is magnificent: solemn, intimate, it follows each stitch closely, each rhythm, each chord and umbilical cord, each tensed condensation of sorrow and defiance. A triumph of a book!

Erín Moure, author of Theophylline: A Poetic Migration

​Karen Villeda’s String Theory is at once a meditation on death and a performance of language as “a body that erases itself.” With its long lists and its flows and bursts of prose, it propels process poetics through the exhaustion of the conceptual and toward a confrontation with “the digression of a person” that feels oddly hopeful in our necropolitical moment. In conversation with María Zambrano, Villeda refuses to disentangle philosophy from poetry, instead summoning dark forces and recasting knowledge as a “bilocation of the senses.” NAFTA’s translation vividly renders the tautness of Villeda’s syntax of absence without surrendering its otherworldly thrum.

 

Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal: Poems

Anarchy for Kids

forthcoming

Seven Stories Press

This pamphlet, published by the Biblioteca Anarquista Internacional of Barcelona in 1931, was written by José Antonio Emmanuel with the objective of emancipating childhood & adolescence from the obscurantist power of the Catholic church. The author sets out to explain anarchist theory & practice in simple, didactic terms. Co-translated with NAFTA.

port(a)folio

traducciones publicadas

The Odd Month
Valeria Meiller

Black Ocean | November 2024

Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009. 

The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law—of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity—attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.

Reviewed in World Literature Today

Excerpted in Columbia Journal

Excerpted in Chicago Review

Excerpted in The Massachusetts Review

Excerpted in AzonaL

Excerpted in Denver Quarterly

Excerpted in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

11

Carlos Soto Román

Ugly Ducking Press | September 2023

co-translated with Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Patrick Greaney & Robin Myers

The title of this book evokes the “other” September 11: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews & media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure & appropriation, the language emerging from censorship & suffocation as experienced under military rule. 11 asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken & unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version into English, taken on by 8 translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma & politics.

Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement 

Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail

Reviewed in Rhino Poetry

Excerpted in World Literature Today

Excerpted in Latin American Literature Today

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COMMONPLACE / Lo común

Hugo García Manríquez

Cardboard House Press | Fall 2022

co-translated with NAFTA

Commonplace examines the layers of colonial & geopolitical violence that underlie both contemporary landscapes of Mexico City & the nation’s literary institutions. Literally, the Palacio de Bellas Artes is constructed over chinampas, floating platforms used by the Mexica in agricultural cultivation. In Commonplace, Hugo García Manríquez delves into the mutually-constitutive relationship between national culture & the culture of nationalism, asking if other forms of poetic and artistic production are possible given the conditions of ambient violence under which that production must inevitably occur. García Manríquez further links the Mexican state―& the cultural apparatus it supports―to ongoing ecological catastrophe, suggesting that more explicit forms of political force find their basis in the slower violence of environmental exploitation & the systematic erasure of indigenous knowledge across the Global South.

Reviewed in the Poetry Project newsletter

Reviewed in Harriet Books

Reviewed in the Los Angeles Review

Reviewed in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics

Reviewed in North of Oxford

Reviewed in SPREAD

Excerpted in "poesía en acción," the Action Books blog

Excerpted in tripwire: a journal of poetics

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The Semblable

by Chantal Maillard

Ugly Duckling Presse | December 2020

Spanish poet and philosopher Chantal Maillard asks whether a world without violence is possible. Beginning with the tale of Nietzsche’s embrace of the Turin horse, & engaging with thinkers from Confucius to Derrida to Sontag, Maillard reflects on how the concept of the “semblable” (one’s other, neighbor, peer, fellow) justifies defensive foreign & domestic policy as well as state-sanctioned global violence. Can we broaden our “frameworks of belonging” & replace our narrow group and species-centered morals with an ethics of interspecies compassion? & if we could, given that the natural world cannot be sustained without violence, would it be possible to create change without violence?

Reviewed in Fence Digital 

Reviewed in Full Stop

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Notes Toward a Pamphlet

Sergio Chejfec

Ugly Duckling Presse | July 2020

Argentine poet Samich moves from the provinces to the outskirts of Buenos Aires & decides to turn his life into a work of art. Fumbling through a world constructed of intuitions & beliefs, he has scant preparation & few firm ideas about how to do this. Nonetheless, he develops a cult following. Fiction writer & essayist Sergio Chejfec offers a series of numbered notes as an outline of Samich’s thinking-in-process, investigating the pamphlet form as a “megaphone” for the dissemination of “views” bound by “a situation of existence” of a poet who “aspired to a voice permanently lowered.” As if to say: by means of the pamphlet, the biography becomes the work.

Reviewed in World Literature Today

Reviewed in the Asymptote blog

Reviewed in The Tourniquet Review

Reviewed in Morning Star (U.K.)

Reviewed in revista Otra Parte (Argentina)

Excerpted in Full Stop

Anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles

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A Year in the Sky, Various Authors

Triana Editorial | 2019

co-translated with Valeria Meiller

A multi-genre collection about the twelve signs of the zodiac, written by poets across the Americas.

Aries. Dorothea Lasky

Taurus. Alejandro Jorge

Gemini. Paula Ilabaca Nuñez

Cancer. Carlos Godoy

Leo. Tilsa Otta

Virgo. Pablo Fernández Rojas

Libra. Gael Policano Rossi

Scorpio. Ariana Reines

Sagittarius. Francisco Garamona

Capricorn. CAConrad

Aquarius. Stuart Krimko

Pisces. Valeria Meiller

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translations

en revistas literarias, antologías y publicaciones académicas

Martín Tonalmeyotl

"My Land," "My World" & "My People" from Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish]. Hostos Revew: Revista Hostosiana, no. 20, special issue guest edited by Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Guzmán & Enrique Winter.

from Richard trae su flauta y otros argumentos (1967). The New Yorker, 22 July 2024 

Martín Tonalmeyotl

3 poems

"Rootwoman One," "Our Mountains" & "Get Up the Nerve" from Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish]. Ecotone, no. 35.

Invited folio of translations from Ruge el bosque: ecopoesía del cono sur, co-curated with Valeria Meiller"Archaic" by Ana Gayoso, "Marking the Wetlands" by Valeria Mussio" & "Flash Food" by Mario Castells; Mussio & Castells co-translated with Valeria MeillerWorld Literature Today, vol. 98, no. 2, special issue on climate literatures from the global South.

“Who Is Luno?,” “My Mother Is Father Moon’s Lover,” & "Nana Tsívita I, II, & III"  from Xlaktsuman papa'/Hijas de Luno [Tutunakú/Spanish], co-translated with Wendy CallLatin American Literature Today, no. 28. Previously published in World Literature Today. 

Nadia López García

from Isu ichi / El camino del venado [Tu'un Savi/Spanish] by Nadia López García [Nadia Ñuu Savi], co-translated with Gabriela Ramirez-ChavezModern Poetry in Translation, no. 3 2023, "Fresh and Salt: Focus on Water"

Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

“Who Is Luno?,” “My Mother Is Father Moon’s Lover,” & "Nana Tsívita I, II, & III"  from Xlaktsuman papa'/Hijas de Luno [Tutunakú/Spanish], co-translated with Wendy CallWorld Literature Today, vol. 97, no. 5, Indigenous Literatures of the Americas special issue

Amada Libertad

"Epitaph," "Extraordinary," "In the Past" & "Pueblo." Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzmán (Amistad/Harper Collins)

Valeria Meiller

"The Hemispheres," "Fish," "Mint," "Boats" & "High Tide." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol 30, no. 2

Delmar Ulises Méndez-Gómez

Valeria Meiller

"Locusts" & "Cinnamon." Chicago Review online

Carlos Soto Román

"Never Again: An Excerpt from 11," co-translated by Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Patrick Greaney, Robin Myers, Jessica Pujol Durán & Thomas Rothe. Latin American Literature Today, no. 25

Martín Tonalmeyotl

"Butcher" & "Our Roads"

from Martín Tonalmeyotl's Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish]. Latin American Literature Today, no. 25

Nadia López García

4 poems

4 poems from Ñu’ú Vixo / Tierra mojada [Tu'un Savi/Spanish] & Isu ichi / El camino del venado [Tu'un Savi/Spanish] by Nadia López García [Nadia Ñuu Savi], co-translated with Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez. Action Books, "poesía en acción#30

Hugo García Manríquez

from Commonplace

An excerpt from Commonplace / Lo común, co-translated with NAFTA. Action Books, "poesía en acción" #28

Carlos Soto Román

from 11

An Excerpt from 11, co-translated by Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Patrick Greaney, Robin Myers, Jessica Pujol Durán & Thomas Rothe. A Perfect Vacuum, November 2022

Carlos Soto Román

"Never Again: An Excerpt from 11," co-translated by Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Patrick Greaney, Robin Myers, Jessica Pujol Durán & Thomas Rothe. World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 5

Martín Tonalmeyotl

A poem from Martín Tonalmeyotl's Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish]. Published trilingually with an audio recording in POETRY, September 2022

Valeria Meiller

5 poems from El mes raro

"Africa," "East," "The Country House," "To the Boy, This Morning" & "Her Birthday" by Valeria Meiller. The Massachusetts Review, vol. 63, no. 1

Mercedes Alvarado

"Untitled," "Vocabulary Against Forgetting," & "MX". Latin American Literature Today, no. 20

Martín Tonalmeyotl

Translation of the title essay of Martín Tonalmeyotl's unpublished Negué a mi madre / Crónicas del racismo, a compilation of ten microessays examining the effects of internal colonization within Nahua communities. Asymptote, fall 2021

Martín Tonalmeyotl

"Chilapeños" & "Under the Night Sky"

2 poems from Martín Tonalmeyotl's Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish]. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 60. no. 4, special issue "Why We Write," guest edited by Mark Nowak

Valeria Meiller

"Yellow Forest," "Deer," "The Drought" & "Teatime". Winner of Columbia Journal's spring contest (translation), judged by Sora Kim-Russell

Karen Villeda

Excerpt of the award-winning long poem, "String Theory", co-translated with NAFTAFolder

Valeria Meiller

".22 Long Rifle", "Some Species", "The Sick", "Crickets" & "Apples". AzonaL three

Martín Tonalmeyotl

Opening poem of Tonalmeyotl's debut collection, Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish] (2016). Modern Poetry in Translation, special focus on Mexico

Valeria Meiller

“The Henhouse”, “A Partridge”, “Grass”, “The Plum Trees” & “The Storm”. Denver Quarterly

5 poems from El mes raro

A.E. Quintero

from El pequeño libro de la lluvia (2017). The first translation of Quintero into English. AGNI, no. 93

Hugo García Manríquez

opening section of the chapbook Lo común (2018), co-translated with NAFTA. tripwire: a journal of poetics, no. 17

Martín Tonalmeyotl

"My Náhuatl," "Attempt at Melody" & "Bad Omen" from Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Atzacoaloya Náhuatl & Spanish]. World Literature Today blog 

Jesús Arellano

select poelectrones

selections from Poelectrones (1972), co-translated with NAFTADenver Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4

César Cañedo

"WHENEVER I like a man at first sight," "MASTURBATING," "GRANDFATHER checks to make sure all the lights are off," "WHEN I'm particularly happy I buy fruit" & "IT REASSURES ME, being the last one to fall asleep" from Sigo escondiéndome detrás de mis ojos (2019). Copper Nickel, no. 31

Hubert Matiúwàa

From the collection Túngaa Indìí / Comisario Jaguar / Jaguar Commissioner [Mè’phàà/Spanish] (2021). Accompanied by my translation of Osiris Aníbal Gómez's essay, "Xàbò Mè’phàà: Ser uno y ser todos. The voice of we in the poetry of Hubert Matiúwàa." Latin American Literature Today, no. 15

Sergio Chejfec

An excerpt from Notes Toward a Pamphlet (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020). Full Stop

Valeria Meiller

"Rabbits,""Locusts," "Cinnamon" & "The Animal." Chicago Review, vol. 63, no. 3-4

Martín Tonalmeyotl

"Spiders," "Migrants,"I," "Recommendation" &  "The Parents of Turtles Also Know How to Fly" from Tlalkatsajtsilistle/Ritual de los olvidados [Náhuatl/Spanish]. Latin American Literature Today, no. 13

Norah Lange

from La calle de la tarde (1925), the debut collection of the sole woman associated with the Argentine historical avant-garde & its literary movement, ultraísmo. The first translation of Lange's poetry into English. The Acentos Review

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