Jen Hofer
Poet
Los Angeles, CA
Sin puertas visibles
An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women
Edited and translated by Jen Hofer
“One of the most exciting anthologies of poetry in any language, translation or original, that I have seen in recent years.”—Forrest Gander
“An exceptional anthology that illustrates the many different realms through which emerging poetry written by women ventures. . . . An extraordinary book.”—Beatriz Escalante
“[Hofer’s] translations are both artistically daring and rigorously precise, true recreations that could only have been realized by someone who possesses a similarly unique poetic vision and language in her own right.”— Pura López-Colomé
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.
“The Dream of the Just” by Dana Gelinas
Next to the fourteen excellent reasons
to make February the month of love,
which serve to advertise the best mattresses
for double beds, queen or king size
I read, just as in the heyday
of Colonialism:
“The soldiers ask the indigenous
people to transport them on horses;
if there aren’t any, they force them
to carry them on their backs.”
April
Pitt Latin American Series
Poetry
256 pp. • 6 x 8.25
0-8229-5798-1 • Paper $22.50
For release April 13, 2003
New poetry anthology provides journey to a different world
Pittsburgh—People often pick up a book in the hopes of being transported to another world, seeking to encounter something new. Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women fulfills that promise. This fully bilingual collection features the electrifying work of eleven poets, none of which has been translated into English before. Edited and translated by California poet Jen Hofer, Sin puertas visibles (no visible doors) opens passageways to a poetry of passion and meditation, perception and sensuous detail, and provides readers with a window through which to view some of the most fascinating writing being produced by emerging Mexican women writers.
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.”
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Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women,
edited and translated by Jen Hofer, is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
256 pp. • 6” x 8-1/4” • $22.50 • Paperback • ISBN 0-8229-5798-1
