Kristin Dykstra

Delivery

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.

Currency

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

Kristin Dykstra

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]

Assumption

Kristin Dykstra

The obvious entry for A is anxiogenic: translation is anxiogenic.

Whereas the convergences defining translation cause anxiety or manifest around situations causing anxiety – be that experienced as apprehension, dismay, desire, dread, fear, fugue, inclination, misgiving, restlessness, etc.

Alternatives. Abolition Abrasion Accompaniment Acumen Adhesive Alien Aliment Altercation Altitude Amnesty Anathema Anodyne Antichronism Apoplexy Arabesque Asperity Asylum Aversion Axis And

Antonym. Advisable

This series tracks recognitions and convergences that give rise to bodies of work in translation. Emerging out of my time spent with Cuban poetry, as well as other writings from this hemisphere, most entries address some intersection between Latin America and the United States, and/or Spanish and English within the US. Some entries center on writers and works that motivate me to continue translating. Others loop outwards to envisage other translators & their translations, and test the frames mounted around translation.

Used with permission of Anna Deeny.
Photograph by Anna Deeny, 2015

Kristin Dykstra’s translations of poetry collections by Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales are published and forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press. She previously translated other books from Cuba, including works by Rodríguez and Omar Pérez, available in bilingual editions from Factory School, Green Integer and Shearsman Books. Dykstra is completing additional books by Pérez, Morales, and the Uruguayan writer Amanda Berenguer, among others. Parallel Editions and Red Hydra Press have published and forthcoming bilingual fine arts editions with her translations of poetry by Rodríguez and Rito Ramón Aroche. With Kent Johnson, Dykstra is co-editor of Materia Prima, an anthology dedicated to Berenguer forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. She co-edited Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Nueva escritura de las Américas from 2004-2014 with Gabriel Bernal Granados and Roberto Tejada. Dykstra lives in Hinesburg, Vermont.