As part of an extensive tour through the United States and Mexico, Dolores Dorantes, Mónica Nepote along with the editor and translator Jen Hofer will read from their recent published book "Sin Puertas Visibles: An anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003, 256 pp. 6" x 8-1/4" $22.50 Paperback ISBN 0-8229-5798-1).
Dolores Dorantes was born in Córdoba, Veracruz in 1973. Her most recent books include SexoPUROsexoVELOZ (Cuadernos del filodecaballo, 2002), Para Bernardo: un eco (MUB editoraz, 2000) and Poemas para niños (Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia, 1999). She is a founding editor of Editorial Frugal, which counts among its activities publication of the monthly broadside series Hoja Frugal, printed in editions of 4000 and distributed free throughout Mexico. Translations of her poems into English have been published in the anthology Sin puertas visibles (ed.and trans. Jen Hofer, University of Pittsburgh and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003), in issue #3 of Aufgabe, and in kenning. Translations of her new work will be published as a chapbook by Seeing Eye Books in 2004. She lives in Ciudad Juárez, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.
Mónica Nepote was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1970. Her books and chapbooks include Islario (Cuadernos de filodecaballos, Guadalajara: 2001) and Trazos de noche herida (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, CONACULTA, México, D.F.: 1993). She has published poetry, essays, chronicles and literary criticism in many newspapers and magazines in Mexico City, including El Ángel, Biblioteca de México, La Jornada Semanal, Nexos, and Sábado. Translations of her poems into English have been published in the magazine Rhizome, in the online version of Exquisite Corpse (http://www.corpse.org/issue_3), and in the journal Bitter Oleander, as well as in the anthology Sin puertas visibles (ed. and trans. Jen Hofer, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). She lives in Mexico City, where she teaches poetry workshops and works as a freelance writer and art critic.
Jen Hofer edited and translated Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (University of Pittsburgh Press and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003). Her recent books of poetry include the chapbook lawless (Seeing Eye Books, 2003), slide rule (subpress, 2002), and The 3:15 Experiment (with Lee Ann Brown, Danika Dinsmore, and Bernadette Mayer, The Owl Press, 2001). She is co-editor, with Rod Smith, of Aerial #10, a forthcoming critical volume on the work of the poet Lyn Hejinian. Her writings against the war in Iraq and the war on terror can be found in the special anti-war issue of A.BACUS, and in the anthology Enough (O Books, 2003); other poems, prose texts and translations appear in recent issues of 26, Aufgabe, Conundrum, kenning, kiosk, NO: A Magazine of the Arts, and in the book Surface Tension: The Problematics of Site (Errant Bodies Press, 2003). She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches and translates.
Event co-sponsored by the Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations, Tropico de Nopal Gallery Art-Space, Beyond Baroque & Otis College of Art & Design. See Home Page for other venues and dates.
THE ANTHOLOGY
Sin puertas visibles
An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women
Edited and translated by Jen Hofer
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press/Latin American Series/Poetry
256 pp. • 6” x 8-1/4” • $22.50 • Paperback • ISBN 0-8229-5798-1
Sin puertas visibles (No Visible Doors) is a bilingual anthology of poetry featuring the work of emerging women poets whose writing exists at the most exciting margins of Mexican literary hierarchies. All eleven poets represented here have had at least one book published in Mexico, yet none of their work has been translated into English until now.
Although Mexico is home to one of Latin America’s most important poetic traditions, the breadth and range of contemporary Mexican poetry are virtually unknown to readers north of the border. These poems are by turns meditative and explosive, sensuous and inventive, ironic and tender, — in short, they are subversive, provocative, bold. Reflecting the diversity and complexity of Mexican poetry, they provide a taste of the adventurous new writing infusing the tradition today.
Includes work by: Ana Belén López, Silvia Eugenia Castillero, Dolores Dorantes, Carla Faesler, Dana Gelinas, Mónica Nepote, Ofelia Pérez Sepúlveda, María Rivera, Cristina Rivera-Garza, Laura Solórzano, and Angélica Tornero
Jen Hofer is a widely published poet and translator who divides her time between Mexico City and Los Angeles.
ABOUT THE PROCESS OF CHOOSING POETS, THEIR POETRY, TRANSLATING AND EDITING FOR THE ANTHOLOGY
New poetry anthology provides journey to a different world
Jen Hofer sees her book as an exploration of the poetry of several particularly exciting writers, not as an attempt to represent a literary group or trend. “Sin puertas visibles is not a panorama of contemporary Mexican poetry. It does not imply an investment in a new school within the vast Mexican literary terrain, and it’s not a who’s who of new writers from Mexico,” she writes in the introduction to the book. “It is my hope this book will provide multiple vantage points from which to explore how some women choose at this moment to engage poetic practice in Mexico.”
Hofer sees the art of translation as both exhilarating and unsettling, for the translator and for the reader of writing in translation. She believes that literature in translation teaches us as much about our own culture as it does about foreign cultures. She notes: “Translation, like a two-way mirror, provides simultaneously a view out and view in, doubling our attention back onto our own language and literature and ways of thinking poetry, even as it illuminates poetic practice elsewhere.”
A combination of factors in Hofer’s life led to the idea for a bilingual book of poetry. The daughter of an Argentine father and an American mother, Hofer, who grew up in the U.S., has always had an active interest in Latin American culture. In 1995, on a trip originally planned to follow the length of the Pan-American highway, she became enchanted with Mexico and stayed there, eventually dividing her time regularly between Mexico City and Los Angeles.
During that first year in Mexico, Hofer spent time in bookstores and cultural centers in every city she visited, reading as many books of poetry and literary journals as she could find. She realized, concretely, just how few Mexican writers are translated into English, and, furthermore, how rare it is for younger, less established writers to have any work published outside their immediate surroundings. She became fascinated with the task of learning what her contemporaries were writing in Mexico, and wanted to share some of the results of her Mexican literary adventures with writers and readers in the United States.
In order to gather work from as many different poets as she could before making her selection for the anthology, Hofer continued her own literary explorations, and augmented them in the winter of 1999-2000 by putting out a call for manuscripts from emerging women poets whose work had not been previously translated into English. The call was published in major Mexican newspapers and about two dozen literary magazines. Posters went up in state-run cultural centers in every state in Mexico.
“My hope was that casting such a wide and public net would lead me to the work of less established poets, especially those outside Mexico City, work I might not have found through my own explorations,” Hofer says. The response was overwhelming. Hofer estimates she sampled the work of over 500 poets over the course of the project, and with difficulty selected eleven for the book. “I looked for poems I felt passionately about, poems that moved me, either emotionally or poetically, in terms of language.”
The poets Hofer chose to translate for her anthology are between the ages of 30 and mid-40s. They are from all over Mexico, from cities as diverse as Tijuana, Córdoba (in Veracruz), Mazatlán, Mexico City, Monclova (in Coahuila), and Guadalajara. Their writing styles are equally and delightfully diverse, though their writing shares a common commitment to language innovations and to an adventuresome expression of the worlds the poets encounter.
Ofelia Pérez Sepúlveda uses a narrative style, very urban in flavor: “And there were days you’ll remember, trivial and in sequence like going back over the morning and going into a 7-Eleven for beers, / days like getting on the bus and saying good-bye to the preceding hours, / days like going to La Fonda and waiting for a miracle to happen, / for someone to offer to take you to wherever, to Real de Catorce or the border, / wherever, listen to me now, wherever’s possible, / where there’s no one to read your thoughts, / simply to be.”
Angélica Tornero exhibits a wide-ranging baroque sensibility, with sweeping, adjectival lines: “…the ill-fated hurry of tales untold, the stockpiling in the shimmying water, / the manioc root losing its leaves, the titanic ferns nubile grazing the gap in the light, the terrible jungle flies and their flights against the confines of our lamps…. . .” In contrast, Ana Belén López writes in short, pointed, startling lines: “A woman / makes the sign of the cross / as she crosses the street / a truck / runs her over / she loses a shoe / her coin purse / opens / the coins sparkle / in the light of the sun”
Silvia Eugenia Castillero employs single paragraphs that form detailed prose poems, each turning on the multiple facets of a single image or idea: “Robins sparkle between leaves, trifling, miniscule, they skid with tonal variations blushing from carmine to rosy, swollen with juice until they glisten cherry or peach.” Laura Solórzano also uses the paragraph as her formal medium, though her wonderfully unusual syntax belies the familiarity of the prose-like sentences on the page: “Letters tend to feel another pronunciation, another labial fissure through which they emerge savage and happy like unexpected panes of glass.”
Each poet’s section ends with a poetics statement exploring the author’s personal philosophy about the writing process, what poetry does in and for the world. These texts are fascinating, and provide valuable insight into literary thinking in the contemporary Mexican landscape. And they are as much fun to read as the poetry itself.
For example, Mónica Nepote says, “After looking at the world I live in, I have returned, with greater anxiety to words, to writing and to reading. Because in words resides a mysterious halo that nourishes me. Because words distance us from destruction, from death. They make us into others, within our own human wretchedness.” Cristina Rivera-Garza’s poetics statement claims: “We need (writing) for this: to stop believing in reality. To begin believing in it.”
Hofer, the author of slide rule (subpress, 2002) and The 3:15 Experiment (The Owl Press, 2001), comments that more than anything, she hopes this anthology sparks new and deepening conversations between Mexican writers and U.S. writers and readers. “It’s such a delight for me to have people read Sin puertas visibles and become interested in learning more about Mexican literary culture,” she says. “Already some U.S. poets have begun contacting a few of the writers in the book to continue learning more about their work outside the confines of the anthology. I can think of no more ideal result of an anthology of poems than for it to ignite cross-cultural conversations that extend far beyond the book itself.”
*****
