Rosa Chávez: “Poetry is my spine.”

February 9, 2022 | in Essays, Profile | by José García Escobar

"Poetry has always moved me, but I’ve also been moved by history, by my people’s history."

Rosa Chávez is La Poeta here, but she defies definition. The Mayan artist and writer has walked a variegation of paths and left her indelible mark on scores of people and places, ensuring that her legacy will be a monument to curiosity, surprise, and multiplicity. In the following profile, Editor-at-Large José García Escobar speaks to the Guatemalan La Poeta and her ever-widening world of poetics, which trespass the page—and language—to take on other numinous forms.

La Poeta walks towards a small table. She lays a sonaja, a tiny drum, some colorful ronrones, and a few whistles made of clay upon it, as the electric sounds of a turntable fill the room. Soon, from the speakers, the voice of Berta Cáceres comes: “We are fighting to protect the rights of indigenous people,” and her speech echoes across the small room of a school in rural El Salvador. “We have struggled for more than five hundred years,” Berta goes on. “We have always lived as a community,” steps in the voice of the indigenous leader Lolita Chávez, “and our community includes mankind, but also plants, birds, fish too, and all the animals.” Wearing a shirt and a pair of small glasses, the DJ turns the knobs to move the musical landscape, which carries the activists’ voices.

“I remember that children had decorated the classroom using bits of paper, mimicking the lush fields outside, the green mountains,” says Rosa Chávez, La Poeta.

La Poeta takes then the microphone.

“Pick it up. Take what’s yours,” she says, she recites, she conjures. “Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let them take it from you. Pick it up. Leave it under the sun. Let it dry. Pick the weevils off it,” La Poeta says, and a tiny whistle and a pair of soft cymbals hiss across the room. “One by one, remove the kernels. Look how it shines: red, yellow, white, black. Undo its body. Grind its body. Cook its body. Don’t toss it aside, though. Don’t give it a bad look. Never forget to grow more.”

That’s how one of Selva y Cerror’s first shows occurred—August of 2017, during the Festival Mundial de Poesía Cien Voces, in El Salvador; the song I’m describing is called La Abuela y el Maíz. Selva y Cerro is a Guatemalan musical duo consisting of DJ and producer Teko (Andrés Azmitia)—best known as Sonido Quilete—and Rosa Chávez. It is also the latest project of Chávez, out of her wide-ranging roles as poet, mother, performer, actress, teacher, artisan, cultural manager, screenwriter, filmmaker, bisexual, Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel.

Rosa contains multitudes. She insists, however, that she’s a poet—an interesting fact considering that she never sought publication. She says that even today when she writes, she’s not thinking of “putting together a book,” despite having published five. Urges move her, motivate her. The multitudes inside Rosa talk to each other. Poetry took her to performance. Performance to the theatre. Theatre to community work and human rights. Poetry is the thread that weaved, and still today weaves, the urges of Rosa’s career. For Rosa Chávez, poetry has no end.

A Titan of Brazilian Literature: John Milton on José Bento Monteiro Lobato

March 18, 2020 | in Interviews | by Shelly Bhoil

Lobato’s adaptations of Peter Pan and Don Quixote have become more so the works of Lobato than those of Barrie and Cervantes.

José Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) is one of Brazil’s most influential writers, a prolific translator, and the founder of Brazil’s first major publishing house. His lifelike characters have become an integral part of the Brazilian society, so much so that restaurants, coffee shops, wheat flour, or readymade cake packs in Brazil are named after Dona Benta, an elderly farm owner in Lobato’s fictional works. Despite the largeness of his influence and the progressive ideas he sought to bring in Brazil through his literary endeavors, however, Lobato has been posthumously accused of racism in his literary portrayal of black people. His work, Caçadas de Pedrinho, has especially come under scrutiny for calling Aunt Nastácia as a “coal-coloured monkey,” and he continually makes reference to her “thick lips.”

Professor John Milton’s recently launched book Um país se faz com traduções e tradutores: a importância da tradução e da adaptação na obra de Monteiro Lobato [A Country Made with Translations and Translators: The Importance of Translation and Adaptation in the Works of Monteiro Lobato] (2019) examines how Dona Benta’s character is instrumentalized by Lobato in his stories to express his criticism of the Catholic Church, the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America, and the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, among other socio-political practices of the times. In the following interview, Professor John Milton speaks about Lobato, a household name of Brazil, stemming from his long-term research on the author’s life and works.

Shelly Bhoil (SB): Monteiro Lobato’s famously said, “um país se faz com homens e livros” (a country is made with men and books). Tell us about Brazil’s first important publishing house, which was found by Lobato, and how it mobilized readership in Brazil?

John Milton (JM): Lobato’s first publishing company was Monteiro Lobato & Cia., which he started in 1918, but it went bust from over-investment and economic problems in 1925. Then, together with partner Octalles Ferreira, he founded Companhia Editora Nacional. Both companies reached a huge public. Urupês (1918), stories about rural life in the backlands of the state of São Paulo, was enormously popular, and within two years went into six editions. Lobato quickly became the best-known contemporary author in Brazil. Dissatisfied with available works in Portuguese to read to his four children, he began writing works for children. In A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado [The Girl with the Turned-up Nose] (1921), Lobato introduced his cast of children and dolls at the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo [Yellow Woodpecker Farm]. The first edition of Narizinho sold over fifty thousand copies, thirty thousand of which were distributed to schools in the state of São Paulo. By 1920, more than half of all the literary works published in Brazil were done so by Monteiro Lobato & Cia. And as late as 1941, a quarter of all books published in Brazil were produced by Companhia Editora Nacional.

Creating What One Cannot Find: In Conversation with Deborah Ekoka

July 3, 2019 | in Interviews | by Layla Benitez-James

Cervantes called Sevilla “the chess board” because there were as many blacks as there were whites.

Today on the blog, podcast editor Layla Benitez-James draws us into the vibrant but seldom-discussed community of Black writers in Spain. In this essay-interview hybrid, she introduces us to two booksellers working to amplify the voices and and experiences of black Spanish writers.

In the past year, I have interviewed three of the panelists from the 2018 Tampa AWP panel sponsored by ALTA, “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” for the Asymptote podcast: Lawrence Schimel, John Keene and, Aaron Coleman. My last interview with Coleman gave me a quote which has been rewritten at the beginning of each new journal I’ve started since December as it got at something that I have often felt but never expressed so well: literary translation is a tool to make more vivid the relationships between Afro-descendent people in the Americas and around the world.

I was reminded of the first time I read Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Of course, nothing overlapped with my life exactly, but there was this kind of constant shock and pleasure at recognizing pieces of my identity described by people from places I had never been, a sense of belonging and kinship.

Beyond dictionaries and historical reference works, in my latest projects I have relied heavily on community to understand the context of the text. I moved to Spain in 2014 to work on translation and improve my Spanish. I had fallen in love with the practice after a translation workshop at the University of Houston and started translating the work of Madrid-born and based poet Óscar Curieses. After a teaching placement in the city of Murcia flung me much farther south than I had originally planned, I began to find incredible Murcian poets, like Cristina Morano, Bea Mirales, José Daniel Espejo, and José Óscar López, whose work I wanted to bring into English.