Unearthed

Omar Pérez and Dennis Casteleiro before recording session, 2010. K. Dykstra.

As a reader Omar Pérez has a charismatic presence. Even when he adopts a low-key style of delivery, the poems resound. Audio recordings of five poems from his collection Algo de lo sagrado (1995) appear below. That book actually contains two sets of poems: the first half showcases work composed between 1982 to 1988, and the second half dates to 1990-1993.

Our bilingual edition, translated as Something of the Sacred, appeared in 2007 from Factory School. For many years leading up to that publication date and following it, readers in the US could rarely hear Pérez read his own work, poor US/Cuba relations being one of the key factors restricting events. Recently invitations have been more successful, best exemplified by his 2014 fellowship at the Iowa International Writing Program.

In 2010 I accompanied Pérez to a studio and requested that he record poems from Algo de lo sagrado. After I returned with those recordings on a CD came a series of mishaps: a lost packet followed by a catastrophic hard drive failure, multiple home and office moves with increasingly scrambled boxes, and on & on. This month I finally rediscovered our original June 2010 CD from Havana inside a misplaced box. After updating expired file formats, I'm posting his recordings of five poems in the original Spanish.

Audio recorded in Havana, 1 June 2010, at the studio of Dennis Casteleiro.

"En el camerino"
Perez-Omar_1_En-el-camerino_Havana/recordings_2010

"Sujeto puro, sujeto desmenuzado"
Perez-Omar_2_Sujeto-puro_ Havana/recordings_2010

"Luna, desorden, ciudadanos"
Perez-Omar_3_Luna_ Havana/recordings_2010

"A una distancia prudencial"
Perez-Omar_4_Una-distancia_ Havana/recordings_2010

"Werwolf, cuarto creciente"
Perez-Omar_5_Werwolf_ Havana/recordings_2010

November 7, 2015

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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.