Cuba

In 2006 Roberto Manzano conducted an interview with his fellow writer Rito Ramón Aroche in Havana.  AMNIOS magazine published the interview in 2012, and it was later reprinted at the website Cuba Literaria (overseen by the Cuban Book Institute).  Unfortunately their page doesn’t currently load on any of my browsers, only a short line warning of malicious code.  Perhaps this replacement is appropriate, since Aroche does something to deconstruct the framework of virtually every question asked by Manzano.  Here are excerpts from their conversation, brought into English.

Where do you draw boundaries between a translator’s research and the collecting of stories about the poet?   Stories expand on the truth while distorting the truth.  Hearing them is an inevitable part of the translation process — or at least it has been for me, because I have translated materials over time from a series of writers with links to the same city, which means that my interpretations are partially influenced by the city's shifting artistic community.

Whereas Nelson Villalobos articulates visual qualities so important to the poetic gesticulations of Angel Escobar, Carlos A. Aguilera captures Escobar’s motion in terms of theater, another arena of expression that was important to the poet. Aguilera depicts Escobar’s lyric selves on stage, jerking through poems with the grace and awkwardness of marionettes. His remarks culminate with the audience's stunned and necessary silence.

Katherine Hedeen has published translations and articles foregrounding a series of Latin American poets.  Much of her work deals with Cuban writing. Recently, though, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a fellowship to translate writing by Jorgenrique Adoum, informing her that this was the first NEA grant ever dedicated to Ecuadorian poetry.

Photographer Alejandro González (b. 1974) has become known for portraits of people that, when shown in groups, become portraits of their cities. Seen above in a photograph taken by González in summer 2015, writer Marcelo Morales (b. 1977) recently completed a new poetry collection that registers personal and collective change in Vedado, a neighborhood within Havana, during the much-publicized transformations hitting Cuba in recent years.