Mexican poet and scholar Alí Calderón is one of the founders of Círculo de Poesía, an online poetry journal that celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 2023. From the very beginning, the project aimed to diversify the cultural panorama of Mexico and has now established a publishing company that explores world literature. In this interview, I spoke with Calderón about the nature of translation, the importance of dialogue with other cultures, and how publishing can be an alternative to sustain literary projects.
René Esaú Sánchez (RES): You have mentioned in other interviews that Círculo de Poesía was born as a project to perceive Mexican poetry from other angles. Why was that necessary?
Alí Calderón (AC): When we talk about Mexican poetry, it is a deceiving category; we think of it as something inclusive when it’s not. Just by analyzing the indexes of poetry anthologies or by seeing who receives certain scholarships, we realize that it is more of a cultural elite.
In 2008, with the birth of the internet and other forms of media, we decided to reinvent culture from other sources. We started working against the tide, promoting poetry from other states of México, like Puebla, Sinaloa or Colima; we decentralized it.
That’s how the journal was born: with the intention of democratizing poetry and making it more visible. But we didn’t do it only with Mexican poetry: we included poetry written in other Spanish-language countries and, out of curiosity, in other world languages.
RES: So, the project was born as a digital magazine, but now you have physical publications. I think it’s quite impressive that an independent platform like yours has not only survived for over fifteen years, but has thrived. Was it your idea to grow this way back in 2008?
AC: Well, the problem with magazines and journals is that they can become unsustainable. Círculo de Poesía, for example, was created by a team of young and ambitious people that later had to work, live, and do other things. But in our case, most of us are now academics or otherwise dedicated to literature full-time, so it’s easier to have some time for the journal.
About the publishing, the project did have the objective of releasing something physically. In fact, in 2009, we published our first book, an anthology of Rumanian poetry called La mesa del silencio. Five years later, we kind of devoted to that fully. Now, Mario Bojórquez oversees the Edition, and Roberto Amézquita helps us with production and distribution.
It is very important to us, this idea of selling and distributing books, because we are against this logic of “poetry does not sell”. We firmly believe that this is the best time for poetry; there were never as many readers as there are today, both in the street and on the web. Furthermore, how many poetry workshops exist? How many creative writing courses or writing schools are there now? How many participants in literary awards? This is definitely a great time, and it reflects out there.
RES: After the anthology of Rumanian poetry, how important has been translation to Círculo de Poesía?
AC: Bojórquez was one of our first collaborators. He is a translator of Portuguese and Catalan, so I believe that has been a strong influence in the collaborators that came later. And, naturally, now there is a boom of translation.
As I mentioned before, we started talking about Mexican poetry, but 2009 marked the beginning of a dialogue with world poetry—after Chilean poet and translator Omar Lara came to Mexico. Lara exiled himself in Peru and Romania because of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, and in Europe, he had the chance to share and present Latin American poetry, but years later, he brought Rumanian poetry to us. La mesa del silencio is a result of that friendship and those travels. The anthology begins with Geo Bogza, an outstanding poet, and ends with Dinu Flamand, a friend of Lara.
So, it has always been important to us to bring different literatures that talk about things which do not exist here. As a matter of fact, in 2014, we organized an encounter of world poets, and as a result we started translating a lot. From that event, some of our books were born: Cien años de poesía china, which includes Chinese poets under the influence of authors like Ezra Pound; and Solo una vez aquí en la tierra, where we include fifty-two poets that came to Mexico to lead poetry workshops. That is important too, isn’t it? To leave something; to recognize authors that plant ideas of poetry in our country.
Now I can share with you that we have published anthologies of poetry from Lithuania, India, Russia, New Zealand, and Portugal. One of the most recent is an anthology of French poetry, translated by Audomaro Hidalgo, a magnificent poet that currently lives in Paris.
RES: Speaking about your collaborators: How do you find them? Or how have they found you?
AC: Well, in the literary world everyone knows each other, right? But in our case, if there is someone that knows Icelandic and is interested in creating a dossier of Icelandic poetry, we give them the chance of publishing in the journal. If it works, we propose them to expand it and make it a book.
For us, physical publishing is a way of delving into specific languages. Our digital journal is completely free: it was always our plan to socialize culture. But if you want something more specific and curated, you can have your physical book. Perhaps you are interested only in contemporary French poetry—well, you can get Hidalgo’s book.
RES: I like that your collaborators have a sort of creative freedom: they don’t have specific lines of work or deadlines.
AC: In Círculo de Poesía we have many types of people: translators who are not academics, professors who teach translation, writers who make “versions” of poems in the sense that Franciso Segovia proposes: you know, “what is translation but an invocation of the original?” I mean, we do have many perspectives on culture and on what translation as a discipline, but we try to convey all that in one space.
RES: It’s odd that you mentioned Segovia. I recall a conference he held with Fabio Morabito some time ago, where they suggested that translation often tells us more about our context, our prejudices, and our beliefs than, for instance, our original literary products. That really caught my attention.
AC: Oh, that’s very interesting, indeed! It relates to the horizon from which you bring a text. We actually have a debate on how to translate; there are people who translate in a very literal way, while others prefer to translate the idea—or, perhaps, they think that what really matters is the language of arrival.
Charles Simic has an interesting idea about this, and I heard it from his translator into Spanish, Nieve García Prado. She expressed how afraid she was of translating Simic. Can you imagine? One of the greatest. But Simic told her: “translate as you wish, what I want is that there is a poem in Spanish”. That has become kind of our motto: there must be a poem.
And of course! We translate from our contexts, that is why we want to dialogue with the global south, not only with American or European authors. It is a way of decolonizing our culture as well. I mean, it would be nice to translate Valéry, but we should see what African poets write, or Iranian, Indian… It is time to reach other literatures.
RES: To conclude I would like to ask, what have you learnt out of these fifteen years of the project?
AC: Well, we have realized that traditions in Latin America are small and narrow. And it is possible that I do not identify with the previous generation or with my contemporaries. Many authors, me included, feel a sensation of uprooting, of displacement. But now I think that tradition is not inherited uncritically: we choose it.
In this sense, we have worked on a category: “Panhispanic poetry”. It is a concept that allows us to feel closer to the work of poets from Spain, Colombia, or Peru, and that enables us to be truly contemporary with other poets.
Alí Calderón (Mexico City, 1982) is an academic, literary critic, and poet. He founded the digital magazine Círculo de Poesía, and became one of the first poets that received the Foundation for Mexican Literature’s Scholarship (FLM). He was awarded with the Premio Nacional de Poesía “Ramón Lopez Velarde” in 2004, the Premio Latinoamericano de Poesía “Benemérito de América” in 2007, and the Poetry East-West Award in 2014. Since 2013 he is part of the National System of Researchers (SNI) and currently teaches Mexican Literature in the Meritorius Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP). Among his books are Imago prima (2005), Ser en el mundo (2008), En agua rápida (2013), and El sin ventura Juan de Yuste (2023).
René Esaú Sánchez (Guerrero, México. 1997). Journalist and translator. He writes about politics and culture weekly for the Mexican magazine Vértigo. He has translated Iris Murdoch into Spanish and Rosario Castellanos into English. He has also collaborated with publications such as Periódico de Poesía,Reflexiones Marginales, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Currently, he serves as an editor-at-large in México for Asymptote Journal.
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