CENTER FOR WRITING ARTS

Desde este blog de la Northwestern University en Illinois, nos llega una entrada de Reginald Gibbons sobre el libro Desde una barca de papel editado recientemente por Littera Libros. Nos satisface enormemente que una editorial humilde como ésta cruce (en más de una ocasión ya) el charco y, esta vez, en una lengua distinta del castellano. Como dice con cierta ironía y todo el afecto Jordi Doce, Littera Libros conquista Chicago. Trascribimos la entrada.

"And a bilingual edition of my poems has been published in Spain by Littera Libros. Desde una barca de papel was edited and translated by Jordi Doce, a Spanish poet and writer very active in Spain’s literary culture, and the translator of a wide variety of works in English (including the poems of Charles Tomlinson); he completed this book by drawing on the translators Manuel Ulacia, Victor Manuel Mendiola and Jennifer Clement. Ulacia, who died in a tragic accident several years ago, not yet 50 years of age, was an excellent Mexican poet and translator who published, in addition to his own poems, a generous volume of translations of poems by James Merrill; he also wrote an illuminating study of Octavio Paz. Ulacia’s maternal grandparents were the Spanish poets Manuel Altolaguirre and Concha Méndez, who emigrated to Mexico because of the catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Until Ulacia’s death, he and I were working together on his translations of some of my poems, so that project remained unfinished. Victor Manuel Mendiola, too, is an excellent Mexican poet–and a man of letters, a translator, and the enterprising publisher and editor the Mexican poetry press, Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia; in English, Mendiola’s work is available in a Selected Poems and in the bilingual Flight 294. Jennifer Clement is an American-born poet and fiction and nonfiction writer who has lived for many years in Mexico; she is also a translator of prose and poetry; her books include her (very memorable) memoir, The Widow Basquiat and a new novel, The Poison that Fascinates. Several years ago, I worked with Mendiola and Clement on translations of some of my poems, thinking to put them together with Ulacia’s translations, but again, that project was not completed. And then Jordi Doce generously offered to pull everything together as editor, translate some additional poems, and here is the book, beautifully produced by the publisher."

http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=763