Rito Ramón Aroche (b. 1961) assembles and dismantles scene after scene in distinct poetry collections. Many pieces project such a heightened awareness of construction and destruction as to put anything called “reality” at a marked remove.
“Cubanology”is a book of days. The poet, essayist, and translator Omar Pérez (b. 1964, Havana) began writing this multilingual notebook from 2002 –2005, while living temporarily in Europe. His journey began as a short professional visit, then shifted into something less defined after Pérez fell in love with a woman named Christina, who plays an important role throughout the notebook.
What matters to me [. ..] is incorporating everything. In other words, not differentiating between literature and the life that I’m living. I think that conserving it there as the work… it’s like capital accumulated toward our possibility of really achieving a powerful state. Not greater, but broader, a passion or a form. Because in each of my books, what has always mattered is the human form of existence itself. Existing and seeing what is happening.
Writertranslators Omar Pérez (L) and Daniel Borzutzky (R), 2014. KDykstra.
Translator as fulcrum: a point central or essential to an activity, an event, a situation. Clearly the model applies to any bilingual reading that depends on a translator to quarterback the event for an audience with limited or no ability to understand the writer’s original language.
However, this entry takes the notion of the fulcrum differently. Daniel Borzutzky has been developing a fulcrum poetics, one located among the activities & events & situations where poetry and translation balance off, moving against and with each other.
Composed between 1983 and 1985, Amanda Berenguer’s celebrated collection La Dama de Elche (The Lady of Elche) showcases her mature writing. Berenguer (1921-2010) resided in Uruguay, and the book is well known there. Yet La Dama de Elche was first published in Madrid in 1987.
Intermedium