Posts filed under 'Poetry'

Beyond that Southern Sky: An Interview with Seo Jung Hak and Megan Sungyoon on the Korean Prose Poem

July 17, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Wouldn’t it be enough for poetry to remain as something that doesn’t really serve any function, something without a definite meaning?

Appearing first in its Korean original as 동네에서 제일 싼 프랑스(Seoul: Moonji Publishing) in 2017, The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry Books, 2023) is avant-garde poet Seo Jung Hak’s second collection, and his debut in the Anglosphere. To me, as a writer and reader of prose poetry and its permutations from the Arabic qaṣīdat al-nathr to the Japanese sanbunshi, Seo’s writings move with the silken grace of the Korean sanmunsi tradition. Forged by turn-of-the-century poets like Han Yong-un, Jeong Ji-yong, and Joo Yo-han, the sanmunsi found fertile ground when Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Threshold’ was rendered into the Korean as ‘Munŏgu’ by the poet and publisher Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, published in the October 1914 issue of the literary journal Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth). The sanmunsi later became, as The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry notes, a ‘notable . . . form, redolent of the aestheticism then intriguing Korean writers’.

Seo Jung Hak reimagines the sanmunsi through ‘paper box’ poems and absurdist tales, crafting language and aesthetics to uncover the poetic in the mundane and to confront globalisation’s homogenising agenda. His translator, Megan Sungyoon, frames his work as a recycling of ‘the rhetoric of outdated ideology and bureaucracy, late capitalism and unrelenting consumerism, and hyper-commercialized culture industry to make an ironic patchwork of languages of the past and present’. 

In this interview, I spoke with Seo and Sungyoon, both in Seoul, about the sanmunsi, The Cheapest France in Town, and the ways in which one can resist linguistic homogeneity.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Jung Hak, can you take us through the years between 1999—when the earliest poems in The Cheapest France in Town began taking shape—and 2017, when the collection was first published? What was your process while putting these poems together? 

Seo Jung Hak (SJH): I have been writing poems since 1991. It took me a few years to publish my first poetry collection, and eighteen more years would pass until I published my second. Personal things happened in the meantime; I got married, had a child, wrote poems on commission for literary magazines, earned some money, bought a car, lost someone, and played lots of video games. Indeed, these things are not very interesting to talk about. My personal history may mean something to me, but not to most of the people reading this interview. I’ve just lived along the currents of the world, with enough swinging and swaying. READ MORE…

Singing, Electric, Body: A Review of bruno darío’s Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation

July 16, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Daniel Yadin

The glee and daring of darío’s style, his technicolor whiz-kid pyrotechnics, induce an especially poignant and headlong involvement. . .

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025

Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation is bruno darío’s mesmerizing monument to literature. Published as a tripartite collection by the Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, it is both a posthumous triumph and an instance of translation as friendship, as a kind of company-keeping in one’s journey across states. When the Mexico City-based darío wrote these beguiling poem sequences during his twenties, he was suffering, then living, then dying of brain cancer, which ultimately killed him at the age of twenty-nine in 2022. The accomplished translator Kit Schluter recounts in his introduction that he was a good friend of darío’s (who insisted on presenting his name in lowercase since the laws of publishing would not allow him to publish wholly anonymously); the two of them, Schluter writes, “had become friends the way poets working in different languages so often do: by translating each other’s work.”

The Lantana trilogy, 153 English pages in all, recounts the doomed, fatal, gorgeous love story between one speaker, “the Inconsolable,” and his beloved, the terrific and terrifying Anfitriona, who kills herself in the first part of the sequence, “feast, fright,” then stays silent in the second, “airsickness,” as the Inconsolable writes letters about her, his life, and his work. Finally, in the third section, “raze,” she is able to speak a bit before the voice of Gravity—the gravity that pulls her deeper into the earth, into her final destination as earth—takes the final word.

There are several paths into darío’s work; I’ll start with Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is referred to frequently throughout the book, the magnum opus of the poet of the body facing the cryptic missives of a young poet approaching death. “I sing the body electric,” darío quotes in English in one of his poems, and he does—he sings the body electric, but he sings the body as it disappears from the realm of bodies past, the body as it crumbles or effloresces into the realm of the intellect and the image. These, more than the flesh, are the guarantors of eternity, and darío takes us on a tour of the seam between them and the real.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Danae Sioziou

July 15, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Panagiota Stoltidou

the locking of the door, the alarm, / and my own passage from fire to ice.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems from the Greek writer Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou. In the first, “Athenian Days”, we’re transported into the commotion of daily life in the Greek capital. Sioziou balances familiar images (insects, breakfast, untrustworthy-seeming people you encounter in the streets) with a more mystical register: “kaleidoscopic / entropies, shells of dreams”. In a melancholic voice, the city hints at an inner vitality, buried by long years of decay.  The second poem, “Tropicalities”, is a philosophical meditation on paradoxes, and impossibilities reminiscent of Heraclitus. Various objects are listed in turn, but they are defined by their inability to fulfill the functions for which they were designed. In contrast, time’s incessant march seems all-powerful.

Athenian Days

Athenian days: flirtations
of cockroaches and shady characters,
eggs sunny side up, totems, kaleidoscopic
entropies, shells of dreams.

I know nothing of rising
stars, the eye is fixed on the first
hour, I am the center of the city,
the bustle, you say, of the here and now.

And if I saw you yesterday, my little light-eating
nightmare, boomerang, brought back
from nothing, shining messenger,

you, moon, I remain dead
only in terrible depths does the drowned
tree of life shine within me.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

1

Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

“I will never die. I will dance. . .”: On Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza

July 10, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Katherine Beaman

Wirpsza’s work may provide some guidance as to what the artist’s role could be in the face of humanity’s darker moments. . .

Apotheosis of Music by Witold Wirpsza, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda, World Poetry, 2025

In the fourteenth century, writing from a state of political exile from Florence, Dante gave us an allegorical tour of the afterlife with an imaginary Virgil as his guide, presenting a cast of historical and mythic figures re-imagined. It isn’t hard to make the connection between him and the twentieth-century Polish poet Witold Wirpsza, who, as he contended with World War II and its subsequent outfalls, wrote from a state of exile in West Berlin and introduced his own cast of mythic figures: Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stalin. Now, from Frank L. Vigoda—the nom de plume of translator husband-wife duo Gwido Zlatkes and Ann Frenkel—comes Apotheosis of Music, a selection of Wirpsza’s cerebral and exuberant oeuvre in an indulgent, cheeky, rhythmic English, at times originating its own pleasant musicality. Where Zlatkes lends his native Polish perspective, Frenkel’s background in musicology allows for an execution of the musical structures and themes prevalent throughout Wirpsza’s work.

Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1918 and educated in music and law, Wirpsza was drafted into WWII, held as a prisoner of war in a German camp, and, after initially being a supporter of communism following the war, eventually defected from the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) in objection to its policies. After publishing an essay critiquing nationalist identities called “Polaku, kim jesteś” (Pole, who are you), he was banned from publication in his native Poland—a sentence that lasted until 1989, four years after his death. He then settled in West Berlin, where he lived for the remainder of his life; there, he brought works of Polish literature to a German audience and vice versa, translating works like a biography of Bach and a novel about Mozart from German into Polish.  READ MORE…

Portrait of a Faceless Man Without a Country: A Review of Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti

June 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander

Alparegho disarms its readers with a forceful and muscular language that tenderly rips through.

Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti, translated from the French by Ann Cefola, Beautiful Days Press, 2025

Today is the day! “It’s today, / great day! / Let’s shake sheets out / the windows, / smash panes and  / replace them, / empty drawers, pockets, / shelves. / Great day!” Hélène Sanguinetti’s collection, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else breaks through walls, those we erect with mortar and brick as well as the more insidious ones we draw in our minds and on the Earth. Through Ann Cefola’s translation, Alparegho effortlessly draws readers into a patchwork of vignettes that question the solidity of home and country, suggesting that these supposedly immutable objects are heavy burdens; we would be better off leaving them by the wayside. In seven chapters, the poet increasingly brings to bear the oppressive characters of the nation-state and the domestic sphere, shattering their hegemony in a sweeping motion that sweeps her readers from one scene, one place to another, looping us back and around.

Sanguinetti’s long poetic career has exhibited a practice that moves between polyphony and plasticity, and the resultant sense of vertigo disorients the internal compass as one move forward through this collection, which incorporates elements of fables, dreams, and songs to disenchant its readers from the sorcery of capitalism and authoritarianism. Alparegho opens with a potent symbol of the weight of home on our backs: a snail creeps through the dark of the night of the house, leaving a trail of slime. From there, the author slyly and gradually suggests that the rooms of the house, or the lands of the king, are interchangeable squares on a chessboard, abstract concepts just as much as lived environments. Here, home is neither comfortable nor cozy, but a rotting mess, slowly caving in. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Shin Kyeong-nim

May 20, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Shane Ingan

If a human shows any interest at all in pigs, / It’s to snatch one up at random for slaughter.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a selection of poems by Shin Kyeong-nim, translated from the Korean by Shane Ingan. In “For fallen things,” the speaker reflects on a life spent with the downtrodden, where “the shattered of dreams of fallen things” remain unredeemed. Accepting the bleakness of such a life brings a contentment that grand narratives could never give them. Meanwhile, “Lucky dream” follows a pig farmer who dreams of living as a pig herself. Though her porcine lifestyle would allow her new freedoms, she’s overwhelmed by the reality of the random violence that all dehumanized beings are vulnerable to. Both poems are suffused with quiet dignity as well as an acerbic undertone, which naturally intermingle among meditations on power, fate, and the unseen costs of collective indifference.

For fallen things

Somehow or other, I made my home in the shadows.
I did not take the side of the victorious wrestler,
But stood instead with the defeated, my fist in the air.
I skipped that rally where the multitudes gathered,
And listened instead to the man in the tattered suit
Surrounded by outcasts and orphans.
And so I have always been a bit melancholy, a bit mournful,
But I never thought of myself as unfortunate.
All that time I was happy.
It was the way people lived.

Never once did I believe that the shattered dreams of fallen things
Would be pieced back together by some benevolent hand.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The River and the Sea” by Abdoul Ali War

May 13, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Patrick Williamson

The sea is first / The sea is mother

That a poem so brief can contain a world may seem incredible to some, but here, Mauritanian poet Abdoul Ali War has accomplished just that. In this poem of fourteen short lines, elegantly translated by Patrick Williamson, Ali War offers a sparing vision of the interplay between river and sea, the water of life and the vast, world-separating lacuna from which all life once came, and to which all will, eventually, return. In a brilliant turn, Ali War inverts the traditional movement between the two forces, positing “The river is a branch / The sea is a tree,” calling our attention to the cyclical processes of the natural world, in which all that we the living depend on emerges from a greater, primordial body. Implicit in the brief, plainspoken lines and lack of punctuation is a deep appreciation for the delicacy of the relationship between these forces; we disregard the river and the sea at our peril. Read on!

The river goes to the sea
The sea has its own
space
It has its own
depth
The sea is first
The sea is mother

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

March 21, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bella Creel, Eva Wissting, and MARGENTO

The latest in literary news from Japan, Sweden, and Scotland!

This week, the Asymptote team takes us across the globe for updates on all things literature. From the inaugural launch of a book fair in Japan, to the appearance of a popular novelist and throat singer at a book festival in Sweden, to the commemoration of a prolific poet and dear friend in Scotland, read on to learn more.

Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan

Tomorrow, March 22, Kobe, Japan will see its first ever KOBE BOOK FAIR & MARKET, held on Rokkō Island with over sixty vendors, some bookish and some local food booths. While the majority of participating booksellers and publishers are based in the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe metropolitan district, companies from across the country will amass tomorrow to promote literature and reading as part of the Kobe BOOK Culture Revitalization Project, created in response to the dwindling number of bookstores in recent years.

The fair will feature four panel events, including a tell-all on the nitty-gritty of running a bookstore and a deep dive into the production of local magazines. The former will bring together three booksellers working in markedly different environments: Tatsuya Isogami from toi books, a small local bookstore, Osamu Horiuchi from the gargantuan bookseller Junkudo, and Takashi Sesako from Page Pharmacy, a half-pharmacy-half-bookstore designed to encourage more random encounters with literature for his patients. The three will share the challenges and rewards of their respective environments and together ruminate on their role as booksellers. Later in the afternoon, Chief Editor of SAVVY and Meets Regional magazines Masaki Takemura will sit down with Youhei Sanjou of ORDINARY BOOKS to discuss the status of bookstores in the Kansai region and the intricacies of editing a magazine rooted in local life. 

READ MORE…

Mario dell’Arco’s Colossal Miniatures

February 12, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jason Gordy Walker

. . . dell’Arco has no problem poking fun . . . but as with the best comics, an edge of seriousness lurks under the poetry’s surface gloss.

Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems by Mario dell’Arco, translated from the Romanesco by Marc Alan Di Martino, World Poetry Books, 2024.

In his homeland of Italy, Mario dell’Arco’s stature rivals that of the greatest Romanesco poets: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Cesare Pascarella, Crescenzo Del Monte, Trilussa, Giggi Zanazzo. Despite this, he has long been ignored in the English-speaking world, but that is due to change with World Poetry’s recent release of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems, a healthy folio of work that spans the poet’s twenty-nine collections, starting with 1946’s Red Inside and ending with 1991’s Roma Romae. All translated by Marc Alan Di Martino (a talented poet whose most recent collection is Still Life with City), the poems are by turns lively, melancholic, curious, strange, beautiful, humorous, sardonic, and pithy, rendered in a way that moves the reader to savor them like a fine Genzano wine—or, if you prefer, “the whole green meadow” of a pistachio ice cream.

In 1905, Mario dell’Arco was born as Mario Fagiolo. Around age seven, he began writing poems in his native Roman dialect, and placed his first piece—a sonnet—in Nino Ilari’s L’Amico Cerasa when he was just a teenager. Later, as he became an architect and helped design such structures as the post office in Piazza Bologna and the Zodiac Fountain in Terni, he invented a pseudonym that would reference this vocation: “Archi-tect, arch, dell’Arco.”

READ MORE…

A Paradoxical Man of Letters: In Conversation with Kiriti Sengupta

January 20, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Dustin Pickering

I . . . aimed to break free from being overly symbolic . . . perhaps I sought to reach out to readers who wished to interpret my poems quickly. 

When I first met Kiriti Sengupta in 2015, I was unaware of his literary efforts. He contacted me on social media as a publisher in the United States, after which I had the honor of naming a few of his books while he inspired two of my most notable poetry collections, including Salt and Sorrow. Our friendship led me to learn more about the history, culture, and literary traditions of India, a country for which I have a special fondness.

Sengupta’s literary corpus include writing, editing, translating, and publishing writers across the globe to bridge the communities. He was awarded the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the inaugural Nilim Kumar National Honour (2024). I have since read all of his books and published him twice with Reflections on Salvation (2016) and Oneness (2024) under the imprint Transcendent Zero Press. He is a paradoxical man of letters, and his efforts sustain a bridge between the United States and India through literature. His poetry is fresh and cryptic, sometimes leaving the reader frustrated for meaning, but it is also ripe with cultural references and idioms that astound me. Finding his work intriguing, I sat down for a thoughtful conversation to better understand this literary figure.

Dustin Pickering (DP): Kiriti, you have authored numerous poetry collections and are established as a translator. Your translation of Bibhas Roy Chowdhury’s Poem Continuous has received exceptional praise worldwide. You are also a publisher with Hawakal in India (New Delhi and Kolkata). Surely, these roles must clash at times! I am curious about why you believed you should translate Chowdhury in particular.

Kiriti Sengupta (KS): My roles clash all the time, Dustin. And they create a clamor when they jostle with each other. (Laugh) So, when I write, I indite my own thoughts. When I translate, I slip into another’s shoes. When I work as a publisher, I think of the readers who would buy the product and whether it would be worth their funds. Money is precious. All these roles influence my psyche in multiple ways, and the Kiriti Sengupta you are talking with will invariably lead to all these attributes rolled into one. So, when someone calls me multi-faceted, I flash a broad smile, thinking I have no choice but to surrender helplessly to my creative instincts to sport several hats.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2024

December 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Len Sander, Liliana Torpey, and Regan Mies

Discover new work from Germany, Lebanon, Romania, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Finland, and Tunisia!

In our last round-up of the year, we’ve selected twelve titles from eight countries, with tales of grand adventure and prose of intimate beauty, novels tracing orature or the piecing together of history, rediscovered poetry and letters from literary titans, stories tinged with horror or fantasy. . . All to send the year off the best way we know how: in the company of our world’s brilliant writers.

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What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated from the German and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill, Liveright, 2024

Review by Liliana Torpey

In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, we are invited into the private, poetic life of the author behind the seminal political texts The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. The door is not opened by Arendt herself—who never published her poems and seemingly never intended to—but by the volume’s translators, Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill, who dove deep into the archives to collect these poems. Reading them feels at once like a gift and a faux-pas, knowing that we are trespassing upon the intimate thoughts and gestures of one of the twentieth century’s great political thinkers.

The entirety of Arendt’s poetic corpus appears in this book. For a lifetime it doesn’t seem like many—seventy-eight in total—but the book’s thorough introduction, translator’s note, and footnotes reveal just how carefully Arendt stewarded these poems over the years. Hill and Grill detail the way that Arendt hand wrote each piece in a notebook or letter, then continued to edit by hand before finally typing up the poems and arranging them chronologically, by season. Packing many of them alongside her essential documents when leaving Germany, her poems “remained among her most prized possessions.”

This care is evident in the poems themselves, which often fall on the shorter and sparser side. It’s clear that Arendt had considered and reconsidered each individual word, trying to communicate what she felt and sensed. In many cases, that world appears to be a rather bleak one: “The sky is in flames, / Heaven is on fire / Above us all, / Who don’t know the way.” While her political writings directly address the mechanisms of violence and authoritarianism, her poems often reveal an unsettling and probing uncertainty.

Alongside—and perhaps stemming from—this uncertainty flows a desire and sensuality that animates Arendt’s curiosity and nostalgia: “Heart warmth / Heart grace / Inhaling deep emotional-being / Sighing softly / Like cloud mist / Audibly trembling touched-being.” Her precision and tenderness are disarming, though not totally distinct from the Arendt that readers may already know. Marked by ambivalence and vulnerability in the face of life’s great mysteries, these poems don’t simply reveal all that we hope to know about Arendt’s internal landscape; instead, they deepen a sense of wonder that hovers, always, just beyond our reach.

letters to gisele

Letters to Gisèle by Paul Celan, translated from the German by Jason Kavett, New York  Review Books, 2024 READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains” by Yiran Li

November 19, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by James Appleby and Yiran Li

Legs are easy to read. There’s only two: / those that have laboured, those that haven't.

I first heard the story of Yongfen Zhang from the cleaning lady at the community library, Yongfen’s roommate. She told me that Yongfen lost her father when she was a baby, that her mother remarried, that she never attended a day of school. To support her children, Yongfen left her hometown for Shanghai. Unable to read a single character, she could only clean streets. She was confined to her room and the streets she cleaned. 

Although I never met Yongfen I feel a kinship with her: we speak the same dialect and come from the same region in central China, with its overpopulation, agricultural tradition, history of famines, conservative thinking, lack of trade and emerging industries. Our region has become the primary source of migrant workers for Shanghai. I meet them in libraries, in barber shops, on streets, and I recognize them immediately once I hear how they speak Mandarin.  

—Yiran Li

Yongfen Zhang, Female, Central Plains

Yongfen Zhang, 1982, Xihua, Central Plains,
street cleaner, Central Plains Road, Shanghai.
Illiterate and tracing the graffiti
of her name from ID to labour contract
Not even in dreams: no mountain, no sea.
Central Plains to Central Plains Road,
map of half her life.

Reading is the refuge of the people
and she reads too, warnings from heaven,
from the landfill take the third right
and read your way back home,
reading her husband’s face (a good man
schooled three years, pinching her tits
so much more gently than her stepfather).
After meals she sits in the dirt
and reads the moving legs.
Legs are easy to read. There’s only two:
those that have laboured, those that haven’t.
Just as she sat, ten years old, on the ground,
concrete-mixer, digging wild vegetables,
hop-skipping to the field with brother
strapped to her back, arms muscled as hammers.
Never thought she’d grow into a sin called
ignorance.

READ MORE…

Languages have their secrets: A Conversation with Mardonio Carballo

October 16, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

...poets are simply those who pay attention, observing what happens, and find a way to tell it…

Poet, journalist, editor, actor, broadcaster, producer, translator, and Nahua activist Mardonio Carballo recently published La canción de las flores, a book that brings together forty-nine poems printed on paper made from corn leaves and vine, published simultaneously in Nahuatl-Spanish, Nahuatl-English, and Nahuatl-French. In this interview, originally held in Spanish, I spoke with Mardonio Carballo about the experience of writing in Spanish and Nahuatl, the relation of memory and language, and the role of translation in preserving an indigenous language.

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I was reading some of the poems you wrote in La Canción de las Flores, and many of them are quite synesthetic. So I wanted to ask: what smells, sensations, or tastes do you experience when writing poetry?

Mardonio Carballo (MC): This latest collection is atypical. I had resisted for a long time the theme of nature—this tradition of “Flor y Canto” that is always associated with Nahuatl poetry. To a certain extent, it annoyed me. On this occasion, unlike my previous collections, which have been more combative, expressing Mexico’s painful reality, I chose to step away from that theme of pain, blood, and death. In another book, I asked myself how much the dead weigh, for instance. But I realized the same thing happened to me years ago when making documentaries. I no longer wanted to focus on journalists, activists, and the same topics. So, I embarked on a journey to film a series of documentaries called We Insist on Hope. It turned out that all those defending land, water, and forests were either threatened with death or had been harmed in some way, which led me to a reflection: the one that guides this collection.

Just as there are no languages without people to speak them, there are no territories without flowers. That premise is what nourishes this collection, and yes, the physical book—the way it was designed—makes it seem like the typography changes, like everything is in motion. I believe it pays homage to the flowers, birds, and trees. After the whole COVID situation, I was left with the feeling that we were suddenly writing poems that were too profound, sometimes inaccessible and incomprehensible to most people. So in this collection, I sought the ease of understanding. In fact, one of the lines that deeply inspires me is from a Charles Simic poem: “I write so that dogs can understand me.” That line struck me. Because at some point, we start using grandiose words that make us seem special, fantastic, intellectual… but to me, poets are simply those who pay attention, observing what happens, and find a way to tell it. READ MORE…