In this week of literary news, we hear from our Editors-at-Large on Spanish-speaking countries around the world! From Spanish-Romanian literary intermingling in Spain, to recent award winners across Central America, to medium-bending poetry across sound and space in Mexico, read on to learn more!
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Spain
As the summer season is kicking in and tourists are about to take over Spain—as is the usual for this time of the year—certain portions of the literary world are seeming to gain fresh momentum. That goes particularly for the transnational and translational endeavors.
The latest issue of the Madrid-based literary journal Ágora – Papeles de Arte Gramático offers a rich overview of contemporary Spanish poetry while including a generous Catalan special feature. A substantive section on Romanian literature is also featured, with reviews of Encarnación García León’s recent anthology of Romanian fiction in Spanish translation and articles on Spanish translations of the legendary writer and internationally revered religion phenomenologist Mircea Eliade and the symbolist Ion Minulescu.
Moreover, the issue opens with poems by past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau in Elisabeta Boțan’s Spanish translation and some of Fernando Pessoa’s celebrated poems in Dinu Flămând’s Romanian rendering. The journal has had a long-standing interest in Romanian-Spanish literary cross-pollinations, as a previous issue featured a sizeable section dedicated to the Romanian inter-war writer Max Blecher, who passed away at the age of 28 after spending a decade ill, confined to his bed, and writing literature that would later be widely translated. Blecher’s collected poems in Spanish translation, edited by Joaquín Garrigós, was a highlight of the issue. Ágora’s Editor-in-Chief Fulgencio Martínez warmly recommends to his readers the summer issue of another Madrid-based journal, Littera Nova, profuse with Romanian writing.
This is not all when it comes to literary journals going full-throttle these days in Spain. . . Also in Madrid, Romanian-language journal Kryton launched its summer issue just the other day. Kryton no. 11 features an impressive number of recent writing in Romanian and translations (mainly from Spanish). Journals like Ágora, Kryton, and Littera Nova feature editors and contributors from a couple of continents. One of these personalities is Asymptote contributor Diana Manole, whose latest poetry collection recently released in Canada is a one-of-a-kind publication. Poems in her native Romanian and English translation are escorted by multilingual (“deflowering”) translations, not only into Spanish, but also French, German, Dutch, Russian, Finnish, and Persian.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Central America
Recently, the acclaimed poet and novelist Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua/Chile) won Spain’s Reina Sofía Iberoamerican Poetry Prize, which many consider the most important poetry prize for Spanish and Portuguese-speaking poets. Previous winners include Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), Nicanor Parra (Chile), and fellow Central American poets Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua) and Claribel Alegría (Nicaragua/El Salvador). Gioconda has written fifteen poetry collections and eight novels. She is best known for her novel La mujer habitada (The Inhabited Woman).
However, Gioconda is not the only Nicaraguan author celebrated recently!
Nicaraguan/Puerto Rican author Edgar Gomez (all pronouns) recently won the Gay Memoir/Biography category of the Lambda Literary Award for his memoir High-Risk Homosexual (Soft Skull), which captures a wide array of experiences, from watching cock fights in Nicaragua to meeting drag queens in the United States. Edgar is currently writing his follow-up entitled Alligator Tears, which will be out sometime in 2025.
Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico
On June 2, 2023, internationally acclaimed Mexican poet Rocío Cerón presented her most recent book, MIIUNI, Fluctuaciones transmediales del paisaje, (Transmedial fluctuations of landscape), a digital collection of poems that combines sound, photography, and video art. Distributed in an ePub format, the e-book seeks to expand the possibilities of the book and the traditional ways we approach poetry. Its title, in the indigenous Purepecha language, means “to know/to connect the landscape,” emphasizing the way in which the collection amplifies unheard and unseen elements of ordinary landscapes. Specifically, the sounds and places to which Cerón draws our attention are patios from houses in Córdoba, Spain, wherein the poet spent three months in an artistic residency in 2022. According to Cerón, for MIIUNI “transdisciplinary production is revealed as a research process on memory and the way in which its forms in language and its sound and visual landscapes create readings of displacement, of what we read about the realities and meanings of intimate space and its dimension with the world. For her, the territory is the sound, the poem and its return to the public space.”
Hosted in Mexico City, at the Center for Digital Culture, the book’s presentation was streamed live, and it is now available in Cerón’s YouTube channel. With her collaborators, the poet defies the limits of writing, performance, and visual art, creating transfixing atmospheres that expand the contents of her books onto the stage in hypnotic performances. In MIIUNI’s rendition, the aural and visual combination of drones and fragmentary close-ups of flowers and architectural features, alongside Cerón’s densely abstract poetry, defamiliarized the watchers. After Cerón’s poetic intervention, common features of ordinary life such as spaces for leisure and residential buildings become strange and alien. Disrupting what we usually take for granted through image, sound, and performance, Cerón’s invites us to see the world that surrounds us anew.
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