This week, our editors-at-large share reflections on prose from Mexico and an event on women in translation in New York. From the wise words of a beloved centenarian writer to a reading celebrating ‘minority’ languages, read on to find out more!
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico
“Prose is everything,” said Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale with cheeky irony. “I have a so-so relationship with poetry, but prose… it presents more challenges to me. Poetry is a matter of rhythm, of good or bad taste. But prose… prose is everything.”
Last year, Vitale reached the modest age of 100, and last week, with unparalleled lucidity, she inaugurated the Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y los Universitarios (Filuni), a book fair organized by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for students, academics, publishers, and writers.
This was not Vitale’s first time visiting Mexico in her century of life. In fact, after the 1973 coup d’état in Uruguay, she sought exile in the country. During that time, she met Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, founded the newspaper Uno Más Uno, and became a lecturer at the Colegio de México (Colmex). “But when I come back to Mexico,” she said, “I care very little about what I have done. I just want to recover those years that were very, very happy.”
In front of a packed auditorium, Vitale remembered how her Uruguay was a modest and small country that arrived late to the dinner of culture: it had a small, clean, and curated history. Her first arrival in Mexico was an encounter with the complete opposite. “Mexico was all history: the official history and the other history, the one that is not organized in books but is basic, the one we assimilate by ourselves, on our own, when we discover an extraordinary poet, a luxurious prose, or an amazing cultural history.”
But what could Vitale, after so many years of life, so many poems, and so many awards, say to a group of students, readers, and academics? Read what you don’t understand? Question the language? Go to the absolute limit of yourself to create?
Between jokes, memories of her childhood, and analyses of some of her poems, she arrived at a staggering conclusion: “Prose is everything. I believe that all of us walk around the world destined to be a little cube of prose that stays, forever, to complete the great cultural panoramas that, sometimes, are bigger than us.”
Very few writers reach that age. Even fewer have the strength and lucidity to attend a book fair for university students, just to express the conclusions they have come to in their life. A vital event, if you’ll allow the joke.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
‘Minority’ languages take the centre stage for #WomeninTranslation month at Jill! A Women+ in Translation Reading Series in New York. Filipino poet and Asymptote contributor Dr Cindy Velasquez’s reading of ‘Pusod’—her visual poem in the Cebuano Binisaya original translated into English as ‘Navel’ by yours truly—concludes Jill!’s #WomeninTranslation month special feature.
‘Navel’, which was published in the second volume of the Oxford Anthology of Translation (2023), is a poem from Dr Velasquez’s first poetry collection, Lawas (Body, 2016)—an excerpt of which previously appeared in Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday. Dr Velasquez, a professor of literature at the University of San Carlos in the central Philippine island province of Cebu as well as a poet, has edited the anthology of contemporary Cebuano poetry in translation, Dagat ug Kinabuhi (Sea and Life), made possible by a National Book Development Board grant, and hosts and produces Basabalak Kanunay, a National Commission for Culture and the Arts-funded poetry podcast featuring Cebuano Binisaya-language poets. She is also a Gawad Urian award-winning song lyricist active in the local music scene.
Jill! A Women+ in Translation Reading Series was founded in 2019 by Princeton University’s former translator-in-residence Larissa Kyzer, a prime advocate of ‘minority’ languages, along with Lisbeth Redfield. “Something that we at Jill! have been particularly proud to do is spotlighting writers and translators working in so-called ‘minority’ languages,” Kyzer, who herself translates from the Icelandic language, said. “We’re excited to be adding a whole host of new languages—including Estonian, Galician, Greek, and Lithuanian—in the coming months”, she added.
Previously, Jill! has featured works by women writers and translators in ‘minority’ languages including Kebedech Tekleab (translated from the Amharic by Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje), Purnendu Pattrea (translated from the Bangla by Somrita Urni Ganguly), Yodanka Beleva (translated from the Bulgarian by Izidora Angel), Stefani J Alvarez (translated from the Filipino by yours truly), Liliana Ancalao (translated from the Mapudungan by Seth Michelson), Azam Mahdavi and Bijan Najdi (translated from the Persian by Parisa Saranj), Aleksandar Vučo and Dušan Matić (translated from the Serbian by Ainsley Morse), and Ruwan Bandujeewa (translated from the Singhalese by Chamini Kulathunga).
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