Posts featuring Katherine M. Hedeen

Against Containment, Attracting Meaning: Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and Katherine M. Hedeen discuss midnight minutes

June 6, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Pazen

. . . I don’t want any borders in poetry. I want to continue the lines, continue the poems, continue this flow. It’s a current of meaning.

In the roughly two decades since Víctor Rodríguez Núñez began writing the antinationalist salvo actas de medianoche and Katherine M. Hedeen began its translation, both have published numerous award-winning works and gained international recognition for their poetry and translations. But despite their acclaim and the widespread success of the poem in the Spanish-speaking world through various prizes and publications (Valladolid, Soria, La Habana), traditional English-language publishers resisted considering the poem and its defiance of  preconceived notions of Cuban and Latin American poetry—until this April, when the book-length poem, midnight minutes, was published in full with Action Books. 

Spanning over 2000 lines, midnight minutes challenges the formation of the traditional poem on the page and the formation of borders of all kinds. Rodríguez Núñez reinvents the sonnet as it curves between the rural towns of his life, from Cayama, Cuba, to Gambier, Ohio, where he lives together with Hedeen, embracing the night as homeland in “one long, dark breath.” Hailed as one of his most influential works in the Spanish-speaking world, actas de medianoche marked a new, experimental turn in both Rodríguez Núñez’s poetics and Latin American poetry overall, now extending into the English for the first time in full with midnight minutes. 

I interviewed Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez about the significance of the translation’s publication today, the contemporary long poem and sonnet in Spanish and in English, their influences from Cesár Vallejo to Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan, and how Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez transform the poetic subject and the object of desire. 

The following dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Pazen (SP): You both have spoken about how, despite the impact of actas de medianoche in the Spanish-speaking world since its initial publication, presses in the United States were overwhelmingly resistant to publishing the English translation, midnight minutes. This was often because of how it defies preconceived ideas of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, poetry. Why do you think right now is finally when these translations are being published? 

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (VRN): Let’s talk a bit about why there was resistance. There is a problem with long poems. Many magazines don’t publish them. Each canto in midnight minutes has fourteen stanzas. The book has more than two thousand lines. And it’s not a book about any explicit Cuban-related theme. It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about. 

Borges, for instance, didn’t like Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. He didn’t like Federico García Lorca’s poetry. I am not in agreement with him in either case, but the reason why is compelling to me. He said that Gabriela Mistral was a professional Chilean. And he didn’t like Garcia Lorca’s poetry because he said that he was a professional Andalusian. “El andalus profesional, la chilena profesional.” I am not a professional Cuban. 

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Where the Poems Live: In Conversation with Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott

March 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by M.L. Martin

There’s a rawness, an honesty, and an urgent need of poetry that is both captivating and heartbreaking. Queerness is at the center of that . . .

Last fall, Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott published Almost Obscene (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), a wide-ranging selection of poems from Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), introducing English readers to the poet for the first time. 

Gómez Jattin’s poetry defies the contemporary impulse to categorize a book of poems or its poet in any straightforward fashion. A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, born in Cartagena, Gómez Jattin wrote from the margins of his literary culture on topics ranging from mental illness to homosexuality to drug use to Greek mythology; the distance between the poet’s life and his subject(s) often seems imperceptible. 

I recently had the chance to interview both translators over a series of emails, during which we discussed the collaborative process of translating this book together, as well as the “deceptively simple” queer poetics of Gómez Jattin, and exactly where in the body his poems ‘live.’ 

M.L. Martin (MLM): Thank you, Katherine and Olivia, for making time to discuss this powerful and important book, Almost Obscene, which is out now with Cleveland State University Poetry Center. I’m always curious about how translators find and connect with their translation projects. How did you first encounter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s work? And what aspects of his work—and his biography as a marginalized queer Colombian poet of Syrian descent—did you wish to share with English readers?

Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): I first heard of Raúl when I traveled to Medellín, Colombia in 1997 to attend the International Poetry Festival. He had been a good friend of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, whom I was traveling with, and he had just died. It was big news at the festival. Raúl was a controversial figure in Colombian poetry, as you can imagine, and the rebel rouser organizers of Medellín’s poetry festival had supported him. I got to know his work through Víctor; which I found both compelling and heartbreaking. He had been on my list of poets I wanted to see in English translation. Fast forward to 2012. Olivia was a student in my literary translation course at Kenyon College. Back then, I’d assign each student a poet to translate, normally one who hadn’t been translated yet. I assigned Raúl to her. She loved the work and eventually her manuscript became her honors thesis in Spanish at Kenyon. At this point, the project was all hers. I had only been involved as her thesis advisor. 

Olivia Lott (OL): Just as Kate says, Raúl was the first poet I translated, as part of her literary translation course and then honors thesis. The project took me to Colombia, where I taught English through the Fulbright Program and spent weekends and holidays traveling around the country to meet poets. My year there gave me time to read a ton of Colombian poetry and to get a sense of the literary scene. I always kept Raul’s work in mind. I was struck by how he was often excluded from national anthologies, and how even in Cartagena (the city where he lived most of his life) his work was difficult to track down in local bookstores. Through this experience I began to translate other poets, but I never abandoned the Raúl project, in part due to the possibility of “righting” his legacy through giving his work a second life in English-language translation. 

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What’s New in Translation: August 2022

August 15, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

Introducing new translations from French, Persian, and more!

As the world reverberates with the powers and consequence of language, this month’s round-up of translations are especially resonant with their assertion of how texts can subvert, heal, and ascribe meaning to life. Below, find reviews of a text that gathers poetry and its translators in boundary-defying dialogues of methods and ideas; a novel that powerfully uses silence to address the transgenerational trauma of the Rwandan genocide; and a sensitive story of an Iran on the precipices of change by celebrated modern novelist Simin Daneshvar.

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Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding, Eulalia Books, 2022

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Managing Editor

How does one review a translation (or rather a set of translations) which center the translator? This is the question I’ve been asking myself as I make my way through Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, edited by Katherine M. Hedeen and Zoë Skoulding. This ambitious collection is unique in bringing together translation practitioners from the heart of the Anglosphere and giving them a space to speak about their practices—what Hedeen might describe as “countermapping,” what Don Mee Choi might describe as “lilymethod” mapping, and what Erin Moure might call “in”mapping.

As you may have gathered from this description, Poetry’s Geographies begins not with the text-in-translation but with the translator, with their essays and methods which speak in sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary dialogues. Through these, we, the readers, are asked to sit with the very contradiction of translation itself—the notion that one language can be “deformed” or “twinned” or “exploded” into another. Indeed, the acknowledgement of this impossibility, the greatest and most repeated cliché concerning poetry and translation, drives the collection. As Skoulding writes in the introduction, “Rather than making the world more transparent and ‘accessible’ for quick consumption, poetry and its translation can sustain opacité…as an opaqueness that allows the Other to exist in full, not to be reduced or subordinated.” Put differently in the essay from Sasha Dugdale:

I stand against this idea of translation as a vitrine in which we see the original. I stand against it here, me, many kilos of proteins, lipids, water, with a slow local history of my own composition and concurrent decomposition (I see also that it is a grave act to scribble in these lines)

no person is a pane of glass no person is of pure intent no person is devoid of history

In this approach, the notion of language as a window is cast aside. Language is smoke and mirrors (me). Language is air (Ziba Karbassi). Language is sound (Skoulding). Language is an infestation (Moure). Language is a sufism (Stephen Watts). Poetry’s Geographies asks us to stare into the mist and watch the swirling shapes, the fleeting shadows, the forms familiar, menacing, and absent. The thing we perceive, in Hedeen translating Victor Rodríguez Nuñez, may in fact be absence:

your existing is not shaped
from the knot that resembles the foliage weave
your being is not shaped
from the board sanded down by countless downpours
barely the keyhole owl eye
to look inside so nothing was left outside
an image in heat

fertilized by the void

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 29, 2019  |  in News  |  by Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Ellen Jones, Eva Heisler, Joshua Craze, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Victoria Livingstone

Special selections from our Spring 2019 issue!

If you have yet to read our spectacular Spring 2019 issue, what are you waiting for? Maybe for our Section Editors to give you their favourites so you can get off of the right foot—well, we’ve delivered. From the poetry by the hand of acclaimed fiction writers, to century-traversing tales, to contemporary criticism on the role of the translator, here are the highlights, straight from those who have devoted themselves to perfecting this issue.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction and Poetry Section Editor:

This issue’s fiction lineup is bookended by two Argentine authors (born in 1956) who grapple with Jewish identity in their work. With The Planets shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in 2013, Sergio Chejfec is much better known to Anglophone readers, but Daniel Guebel is not exactly an unknown entity—recently the publisher Beatriz Viterbo released an anthology of essays contributed by such writers as César Aira celebrating Guebel’s work. Via “Jewish Son,” Jessica Sequeira’s perfectly pitched translation, English readers are introduced to bits of a weltanschauung that include pilpul (aka spicy thought, a method of interpreting the Talmud), tango singers, readings of Kafka and The Aeneid, all taking place in the last act of a father-son relationship. Yet, it is also very emotional—despite, or perhaps all the more so because of, the philosophical exposition. As with the best fictions, Guebel gestures toward a gestalt beyond the text. I can’t wait for more of this heavyweight to appear in English.

In the poetry section, which I also assembled, two highlights (also bookending the section) are Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the now-international formalist Oulipo movement, and Georgi Gospodinov, acclaimed for The Physics of Sorrow, showing that they have as much talent as poets as they do as fiction writers. An especially exciting discovery is Gertrud Kolmar, nom de plume of Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, advocated by cousin Walter Benjamin, but only now celebrated as one of the great forgotten poets. Characterized by mystery, the taut but dreamlike poems channeled with elan by Anna Henke and Julia Gutterman are fueled by an “ache unnamed”; “a glimmer burning out its flame.” 

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