Commentaries - June 2015

Delivery

Juan Carlos Flores in Alamar, Video Still, by Kristin Dykstra 2010
Juan Carlos Flores in Alamar, Video Still, by Kristin Dykstra 2010

Juan Carlos Flores has earned recognition for his poems as written texts, and as a translator, I worked primarily within the visually oriented spaces of the page and the screen to recreate his work in English. [Click here to see the University of Alabama Press page for the book.] But Flores takes those same poems as scripts for performance, lending a whole other register to his work. To bring the texts into English without some commentary or other form of addressing performance — like the 2010 video I’m posting at the end of this entry — would greatly limit understanding of the work.

Robert Creeley in conversation with Alan Riach at the University of Waikato, NZ, 1995

New on PennSound

Alan Riach interviews Robert Creeley, University of Waikato, New Zealand, July 26, 1995
(51:15): MP3
Creeley reads two poems:
"I Know a Man" (0:25): MP3 (Creeley discusses the poem at the beginning of the interview)

Currency

Juan Carlos Flores 2010, Video Still, by Kristin Dykstra
Juan Carlos Flores 2010, Video Still, by Kristin Dykstra


Juan Carlos Flores traffics in poems, written as well as performed.  They are his currency. 

As do writers in most places, Juan Carlos Flores expresses an occasional preference for actual currency to be his currency.  But there it is.

Bird, La Bruja

Soleida Ríos, Photo by Kristin Dykstra, 2013
Soleida Ríos, Photo by Kristin Dykstra, 2013

Soleida Ríos (b. 1950 in eastern Cuba) is a remarkable poet from whom comparatively little work is circulating to date in English.  There may be a further delay in terms of book projects in translation, for Ríos lost a translator when Barbara Jamison tragically passed away. 

The death of a translator is a reminder of the small, mortal scale of possibility embedded within these our “global” landscapes.  It’s also a cue to remember, with Esther Allen, that “the translation of a text often depends largely or perhaps wholly on contextual factors that have less to do with the work’s intrinsic value (whatever that might be and however you might measure it) than with encounters between individuals and the shifting cultural and political contexts within which those encounters take place.”[1]