I discovered one of my favorite poets—the musician, filmmaker, and diplomat Gaspar Orozco—through Ilana Luna in the pages of Scotland-based Reliquiae: A Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology. In Luna’s lulling translation, Orozco’s El Libro de los Espejismos (The Book of Mirages) meditates on the lacuna between memory and myth, and the interstices between sentience and sleep. In this interview, I asked Luna about, among other things, translating Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco and essayist Carlos Monsiváis, as well as Mexican literature in translation, with small indie presses as their prime movers.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love your translation of Gaspar Orozco published at Reliquiae Journal! And you have a forthcoming book of translation from Orozco’s poems under the Corbel Stone Press imprint, Xylem Books. What should Orozco readers like me expect from this new title?
Ilana Luna (IL): In fact, we have several manuscripts we’ve been working on. The first we completed is El libro de los espejismos/The Book of Mirages. It’s quite a marvelous book, with prose poetry as well as formal poetry, haiku, sonnet, octaves. They were the most fun to translate, truth be told; I love the puzzle or game-like challenge that formal limitations pose. Several of these poems appeared in Reliquiae, as well as in the July 2021 issue of Indian publication Poetry at Sangam. The one you mention, with Corbel Stone Press, is what we’re currently working on. It is more of an anthology of Orozco’s work, with a focus on natural phenomena and a mythic tone, taken from across his ten-book corpus. As always, Gaspar’s poetry is full of luminescent landscapes, vignettes, and often, has a mesmerizing, rhythmic quality. I try to capture this in my translations.
AMMD: In his prólogo to Lapidario: Antología del aforismo mexicano (2014), critic-translator Hiram Barrios maps the presence of aforismos en verso (“aphorism taking refuge in the short poem”) within Mexican poetry since the late nineteenth century, naming Gaspar Orozco’s father as a practitioner of this “anomalous” free-verse that “questions the nature of genre.” Do you think Orozco has followed in his father’s footsteps, and how, if so, has that influenced the way you translated his works?
IL: I’m quite sure that Orozco was deeply impacted by his father’s love of literature, and he tells stories of youthful interactions with preeminent Mexican scholars and literati—for example, the infrarealist poet José Vicente Anaya, also from Chihuahua, whose famous poem “Híkuri” is a reference in our “Notas de un cuaderno de híkuri”/ “Notes from a Peyote Journal.” Orozco’s prose poetry has been elegantly analyzed in “‘Image Machine’: Gaspar Orozco’s Book of the Peony and the Prose Poem Sequence as Perceptual Trick,” Helen Tookey’s chapter of Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). As for how this paternal influence has impacted my translation, I’d have to say not very much—or at least not directly. I know I can’t be alone in this, but when I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling, it is something like a cover. It is always a direct interface between me and the poem, nothing else. As sheer as that, it is an immersion and a remaking, a new thing unto itself.
AMMD: You’ve also translated Juan José Rodinás (Ecuador), Giancarlo Huapaya (Peru), Judith Santopietro (Mexico), Stephanie Alcantar (Mexico), and co-translated Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico). I am curious about your process in choosing which authors and works to translate, which translators to work with.
IL: I’ve also translated Ignacio Ruíz Pérez (Mexico), Cristián Gómez Olivares (Chile), Paul Guillén (Peru), Angélika Ortiz (Mexico), Mauricio Espinoza (Costa Rica), among others whose works are not yet published. I like the idea that there is a method to my madness, though it is a much more organic process than all that. In almost every case, I have some sort of personal relationship with the poet, or have been introduced by a mutual friend and asked to translate. Sometimes I hear or read something and I simply must translate it. Because poetry, in many ways, resides outside the flows of commerce, I could say it is merely capriciousness on my part. I translate things I like, things that are interesting, weird, beautiful, aching, urgent, political. I am fortunate to be able to choose projects that are meaningful, that are mind-bending, that don’t require me to put food on my table. So, I translate, in essence, for love.
AMMD: One of your forthcoming book projects is a critical edition and co-translation with essayist Carlos Monsiváis, an authority in Mexican politics and history. A champion of the marginalised, he was catalogued in the Encyclopedia of the Essay and was named by Sergio Pitol, in his memoir The Art of Flight (tr. George Henson), as a “constantly expanding polygraph, a one-man writers’ union, a legion of heteronyms … bibliophile, a collector of a thousand heterogeneous things, felinophile, Sinologist.” How did you come across him and what urged you to pursue this project?
IL: This project, edited and commented with Norma Klahn, emerita Professor from UC Santa Cruz, has been a monumental undertaking. I only met Monsiváis once, at a conference in Irvine, California, where he delivered the keynote on what the future held for Mexico as it approached the centennial of its Revolution, and Bi-centennial of its Independence, in 2010. Norma was a dear friend of Monsiváis, and she has been a friend and mentor to me since I was a graduate student in Santa Barbara. This project occurred to us one day after I had shared with her a review I wrote of a fantastic study that she co-edited: Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas.
One cannot study Mexican film, literature, or popular culture without running into Carlos Monsiváis and his quick-witted pen. The book we then translated was a collection of his feminist writings, compiled by the scholar Marta Lamas posthumously. He was a profound ally to the women’s liberation movement in Mexico, as well as the LGBTQ+ community. He advocated for inclusion and, more than tolerance, he advocated for a critical, logical examination of deeply held biases present in the culture. It seemed to us that given all that has been happening in the United States—with the retrograde political backlash against women’s bodily autonomy, trans rights, and more—it was the right moment to bring Monsiváis’s writing into dialogue with the United States and English-speaking public at large. There are lessons to be learned from a dialogue with Monsiváis, from his ability to trace the genealogies of prejudice and propose ways to undo the Gordian knots of culture.
AMMD: The esteemed scholar Ignacio M Sánchez Prado credits the “heroic work of small nonprofit presses,” which made available “nearly all works” of contemporary Mexican literature in translation, noting that “translation of authors outside mainstream channels of transnational book circulation” is necessary. How crucial is the role of small and independent presses in the current literary translation scene?
IL: Oh, curiously enough, just last month, at the same conference in Irvine, Nacho presented, in part, on this very topic. We had a wonderfully productive conversation around small press publishing and the work that small presses, such as Cardboard House Press, are doing. I refer specifically to Cardboard House because it is near and dear to my heart, having been a member of the board since 2014, when I first met Giancarlo Huapaya in Arizona. His love of Latin American poetry and his commitment to its publication in bilingual format, alongside wonderful editors like Gómez Olivares and the fantastic translator, Charlotte Whittle, among many others, has allowed us to build a catalogue of over thirty-five books, experimental books, challenging books, by authors that represent the spectrum of human experience. There are other wonderful small presses in the United States like Action Books—that are focusing on poetry and works in translation from around the world, Eulalia Books, and Dorothy Project that publishes two books a year by women authors—many of them translations. What is most exciting to me is to see that translation, in this context, becomes not something to try and hide, but something that is boasted about, with pride. Without the work of these small presses, I think that the literary scene would grow quite stale. The world is too large and wonderfully diverse for us to navel gaze and only read things written in and about our own countries, our own groups, don’t you think?
AMMD: This seems like a loaded question but I am interested in the contrasts: what differences are there between translating poetry versus essay; translating solo versus in collaboration; and translating living authors versus those who are dead?
IL: With poetry I feel more free; it is like cooking with a mastery of the elements and recombining, recreating something delicious that harkens to something else, with the ingredients that you have at hand. It is a gesture towards sensation less than sense-making, whereas, with essay, synthesis and distillation of meaning become paramount.
Co-translating can be joyous and dazzling; my collaborator Cheyla Samuelson and I have written at more length about our experience working on Cristina Rivera Garza’s poems. For me, translating poetry is a much more embodied experience than translating essay, which is cerebral, and translating living authors is wonderful because it allows for a co-creation, a give and take that often—not always—ends in editing the original document as well. In co-translating Monsiváis after his death, working with Norma allowed me access into her recollections of him as a friend, his way of speaking and thinking and being in the world, so that came too into play. We are never really writing or translating alone. There are always other presences, embodied or haunting.
AMMD: Apart from quoting from your book to her introduction, Emily Hind mentions you in Dude Lit: Mexican Men Writing and Performing Competence, 1955–2012 (The University of Arizona Press, 2019):
I have to wonder what young scholars like Ilana Luna might choose for their next project. Luna has begun—like so many of us—with an optimistic feminist project: that of “adapting gender” and stepping aside from the male heterosexuality behind canonical Mexican art. Will Luna . . . turn next to something more traditional lines? I would like to imagine us, in a phrase borrowed from Donna Haraway, as “staying with the trouble.”
How have you been staying with the trouble lately, so to speak?
IL: I hope I can live up to Emily’s reading of Haraway, but yes, I think I have been “staying with the trouble.” In 2019, I programmed an international film festival in Mexico City: the Femme Revolution Film Fest, to bring together films which focus on robust, unique, and diverse female characters—that imagined, to borrow from Rosario Castellanos, “[o]ther ways of being human and free.”
I am currently working on several different book translations, with authors that I already mentioned, and have joined the editorial team of Cardboard House Press as well. Perhaps we could say that I am always drawn to the trouble, really, because that’s where the fun is, too.
Ilana Luna is an associate professor of Latin American Studies and Spanish at Arizona State University. She holds an MA in Spanish and Portuguese and PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of California in Santa Barbara where she was the first doctoral student who specialised in translation studies. She has authored Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (State University of New York Press, 2018) and is co-director of programming for Femme Revolution Film Fest in Mexico City. A translation fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts, her translation of Mexican poet Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Madre Coqa (Orca Libros, 2019) was shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation. A singer, writer, and translator of poetry and prose, her works were published in Harper’s Magazine, Hostos Review, Reliquiae: Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology, Tupelo Quarterly, Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericano, Poetry at Sangam, Contrapuntos, among others.
Alton Melvar “Sam” M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their lyric essay has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Their latest poems, essays, and translation have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’re assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.