Sant Jordi 2022 - Daniel Borzutzky, Lucina Schell and Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Join us as three multilingual experts discuss translation as part of the process of memory and justice in post-dictatorship Argentina and Chile, as well as peak-capitalism contemporary Chicago. We’ll hear readings from Daniel Borzutzky’s translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia, Lucina Schell’s translation of Miguel Angel Bustos’ Vision of the Children of Evil, and Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s collection Place-Discipline.
This event will be held in-person at Seminary Co-op. At this time, masks are required while in the store and strongly encouraged at outdoor events.
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About Valdivia: What spirits lurk beneath the surface of Valdivia's Calle-Calle River or loiter under the arches of the Pedro de Valdivia Bridge in southern Chile? Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia answers this by intertwining memories of disaster and tragedy--personal, political, and natural--to recreate and relive each anew in unforgettably vivid poetry. Set in a city rich with history and mythology, Valdivia reveals a Necropastoral Chile--by evoking the threatening natural environment that bore the devastation of the most powerful earthquake on record and the state-sponsored violence of recent Chilean political history. With Ghigliotto's Valdivia, Daniel Borzutzky continues the urgent and necessary work of translating contemporary Chilean poets as he deftly Englishes Ghiglotto's verses, full of the shadowy figures and images of legend that plague the city and the psychological memoryscapes that haunt the poet.
About Daniel Borzutzky: Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator from Spanish. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press), won the National Book Award. His most recent publication is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021); and Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His work has been recognized with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund; and the Illinois Arts Council.
About Vision of the Children of Evil: Simultaneously prophetic and blasphemous, Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Ángel Bustos presents a mystical rejoinder to the inequities of the Americas, a revision of history through the motif of divine descent, as relevant and revolutionary today as when the poems first debuted in the 1960s. In Bustos's poetry, language is both a tool of subjugation and a device to conjure a strange world that transcends the one we only think we know. And like a postcolonial Rimbaud, he repurposes symbols to develop his own: universal, synesthetic, and above all, musical. Polyvocal, intertextual, and hybrid in form, these books span aphoristic fragments, prose poems, lyrical prose chapters, and linguistically experimental free verse, voicing Spanish colonizers and invented indigenous characters alike. In this bilingual dual edition featuring both Fantastical Fragments (1965) and Vision of the Children of Evil (1967), anglophone readers have their first opportunity to experience Bustos's poetry. A poète maudit whose untimely death was ironically brought on by his leftist politics, Miguel Ángel Bustos reinvents the origin myth of Argentina—and the Americas—laying bare all its promise, all its pain.
About Lucina Schell: Lucina Schell is International Rights Manager at the University of Chicago Press. She is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective, and translates poetry from the Spanish. Recent translations include Daiana Henderson’s So That Something Remains Lit (Cardboard House Press, 2018), and Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Ángel Bustos (co•im•press,2018. Her translations of poetry by Erika Martínez have appeared in POETRY magazine, and in Point of Contact (Syracuse).
About Place-Discipline: Place-Discipline lyricizes 21st century subjectivity as the byproduct of, and resistance to, global capitalism's necropolitics and the encroachment of occult financial industries and vectoralism on the human's right to chaotic embodiment and trans-formation. Taking its title from Sun Ra's 1972 album, Discipline 27-II, Moctezuma's book explores hybridity, hyphenation, and heliocentric border-crossing as possible alternatives to the darkening "white magic" of cognitive capitalism and cultural gentrification. At once a disquisition on the economics of austerity and a response to the enforced scarcity in our rights to spectral identity, difference, and translanguaging, Place-Discipline seeks to bypass the binary code of depoliticization by reaching the plateau of an enunciation which speaks through fracture, and which sings through DuSablean absence.
About Jose-Luis Moctezuma: Born in San Gabriel, CA, Jose-Luis Moctezuma has lived at different stages in his career in Berkeley, Philadelphia, Seoul, and Chicago. His poetic and critical work has been published in Jacket2, Chicago Review, MAKE Magazine, Cerise Press, FlashPoint Magazine, PALABRA, Hydra Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, and more. He received his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005.
Related Titles
Translated by Lucina Schell. "'Something remains to be said about childhood / beyond what we've said / and keep on saying.' Here is where Daiana Henderson's poems, rendered beautifully in Lucina Schell's translation, have come to bear: in the space between nostalgia and brusqueness, between...