title | duration |
---|---|
Antes de decir cualquiera de las grandes palabras | (1:48) |
Oración del 24 de diciembre | (4:00) |
Fruta | (0:25) |
Encima | (0:23) |
Abres y cierras | (0:22) |
Poema de Gottfried Benn | (0:48) |
Cantar del Dinero | (1:26) |
Canto del kiwi | (0:47) |
Wednesday, January 13
Seattle, WA
Seattle Central Library
Microsoft Auditorium
7:00 pm
The evening will be presented by the Washington Center for the Book at The Seattle Public Library, Copper Canyon Press, and The Elliott Bay Book Company.
Location: 1000 Fourth Ave.Friday, January 15
Port Townsend, WA
Joseph F. Wheeler Theater
7:00 pm (tentative)
Location: 25 Fort Worden Way
Port Townsend, WA
Contact: Joseph Bednarik, joseph@coppercanyonpress.org
Saturday, January 16
Portland, OR
First Unitarian Church
7:00 pm
Tuesday, January 19
Oakland, CA
Class visits to two elementary schools with Poetry Inside and Out (Center for the Art of Translation)
9-11:30 am
Tuesday, January 19
San Francisco, CALocation: 261 Columbus Ave.
Contact: Peter Maravelis, peter@citylights.com, 415-362-8193
Wednesday, January 20
Stanford, CA
Stanford University
Center for Latin American Studies (Bolivar House)
12 noon
Co-sponsored by the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, The Center for Latin American Studies, and The Stanford Workshop in Poetics
I had gotten together with David Huerta in Tlayacapan in the Mexican state of Morelos to work on a new batch of translations. We had done this once before for a whole week while I was in residence at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and David was an invited guest. It had been a wonderful experience for both of us (and was the genesis of this book.) And yet, we both found ourselves a bit nervous as we approached the task at hand: I, reading my translations aloud, and he, following the original. Then I would ask him the questions I had about what he had meant in the originals and he would comment on and note mistakes and misunderstandings in my translations. With one particularly difficult passage, David tried again and again to explain not only the meaning of certain phrases but why he had used certain words and images. A full understanding of what he was explaining eluded me. We let it rest and went on to discuss other translations. At some point he got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back, he told me, with a pained look on his face, that he was starting to doubt whether the poem I couldn’t quite understand was a good one. If it were, he was thinking, I shouldn’t have so much difficulty understanding it. I laughed out of sympathy: I always felt a bit of anxiety when I read my translations, anticipating that he might tell me, when I finished, that my translation didn’t standing up to the original at all, that I didn’t get it at all. Of course, that never happened. And of course, David’s poems tend to be magnificent.
I love reading Huerta’s poem “Before Saying Any of the Great Words” to a live audience. To my eyes and ears, it is one of the sweetest love songs to language and to the human species I know of. And it’s a ball to read! At the beginning, the audience is suspended in David’s grammar, which dangles from the title. Then the poem starts to solidify and slowly the audience realizes that the poet is talking about words themselves and the human beauty that they express, represent, bear witness to. By the time I get to the second half of the poem, where David allows me to say words like “sandalwood” and “deoxyribonucleic” and phrases like “combinations [of words like] your mouth, this letter” I am inevitably feeling shivers up and down my back and suspecting that a good portion of the listeners are as well. When the poem comes to its hushed conclusion, I feel like I’ve just been through some sort of linguistic ceremony—a reinitiation into language and humanity. And I feel honored to have been able to share David’s poem in my English.
A few days into 2008, I met with David Huerta at his wife’s studio in Mexico City to go over the last four translations I had done for this collection. When we got to the end of one of them, “Passions,” he said that there were additional layers of meaning embedded in the last two lines than I might be aware of. The last two lines are: and so many rags bearing divine faces on the way out of the bullring. In the New Testament, Huerta reminded me, when Jesus was carrying the cross to Golgotha, a woman stepped up to wipe his face with a rag. The name of that woman was Veronica. The image on the cloth of Jesus’s face also became known as a veronica. In a stunning stroke of metaphor, a veronica is also the name of the move in bullfighting in which the bullfighter stands in place and slowly swings the cape away from the bull as it charges. And so I was coming to understand these two lines on a much deeper—i.e. complex—level. And finally, as if language in Huerta’s hands could bear any number or layers of meaning, Huerta reminded me, “my wife’s name is Veronica.”
“In 2001. Los cuadernos de la mierda was published with illustrations by the Oaxacan painter Francisco Toledo and poems by David Huerta. The story of this book is rather unusual. It turns out that in Mexico, the Ministry of the Treasury, which is in charge of collecting taxes in Mexico, has a special program for artists called pago en especie (payment in kind). This means that painters, sculptors, printmakers, and other visual artists can pay their back taxes with their own art works if they wish. (This has turned the Ministry of the Treasury into the largest art collector in Mexico, but that is another story.) “So, at some point in the 1990s, people at the Treasury discovered that Francisco Toledo, one of Mexico’s greatest painters of our time, owed them taxes. They notified him that his taxes were overdue and that he could pay them through the Payment in Kind program. And that is what Toledo did. But the works he sent to the Treasury in lieu of money were not drawings or watercolors or paintings but rather, a series of notebooks valued at some huge sum of money—dozens and dozens of notebooks that he had been filling over the years with drawings and notes. And this series had a title: Los cuadernos de la mierda (The Shit Notebooks). This was what he sent to the Treasury to pay his back taxes. It seems that the Treasury accepted the notebooks with good humor—so much so that several years later, they proposed to Toledo that they publish a selection of these drawings. “Toledo called me and asked that I write some poems to accompany the drawings. I happily agreed, because I have admired Toledo and his work all my life, and I sat down to write the poems. The truth is that I hadn’t exactly planned to write on this theme—I don’t mean the topic of taxes or the Treasury, but rather, defecation. It was an excellent challenge and I dove into it with enthusiasm at the chance to accompany Toledo, an artist whom so many Mexicans admire and esteem as a true genius. So it was with great pleasure that I wrote the poems, and in 2001 the book was published.”
Studies in Philosophy, English Literature, and Hispanic Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UNAM)
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