Hi, everyone.
In my role at ALTA, I interact with translators every day.
And I've learned they are as varied in their approaches
as is any other artist to their art.
Tonight, we will hear from poet/translator, Rosa Alcalá.
And by way of introduction, I want to think about what kind
of translator Alcalá is.
Rosa Alcalá has translated a number of poets into English
with a focus on contemporary Latin American women writers
living in the US, including Lourdes Vázquez and Lila
Zemborain.
But she's now best known for her monumental translation
and archival work over the course of more than 20 years
on the poetry and performances of Chilean artist,
Cecilia Vicuña, work that is, according to Daniel Borzutzky,
quote, "Utterly relevant at this particular moment in our social
and literary environments."
I'm struck by the kind of long-term vision Alcalá has
always had about the importance of bringing Vicuña's work
to a wider English-speaking audience.
Since 1996, she has translated Vicuña and shared a friendship
with her.
But it was in 2012 and 2018 that two comprehensive volumes
of Vicuña's poems and performances,
both edited and translated by Alcalá, were published.
She's the kind of translator who saw genius and followed it
for as long as it took to shake the rest of the world enough
to make them see it, too.
These two most recent books also include voices besides
Vicuña's and Alcala's, such as translations by all
of Vicuña's translators over the years and reflections by others
on the experience of being present
at Vicuña's performances.
Alcalá knows the importance of working together to use
translation to fight against loss.
She's a generous translator, one who knows
her version is not definitive.
She has also included a number of retranslations
of her own translations in these two books.
And she might say that she has grown in her ability
to "version" poems.
She's the kind of translator who lives
in the fluid space of language, recognizing texts are not fixed
but living and changeable.
Alcalá is also a Professor in the Bilingual MFA in Creative
Writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso.
And she's a writer of three books of her own poetry.
I see in her poems an affinity with those of Cecilia Vicuña
in her desire to push boundaries, to show us that,
in fact, boundaries are often arbitrary,
man-made constructions.
As a daughter of Spanish immigrants to New Jersey,
she has lived for a long time in both
the Spanish and English languages.
But I love what she says about poetry,
that it is, in fact, another language beyond either Spanish
or English, a space in which to say the impossible.
I hope that we will hear some of her poems
tonight, in addition to some of her translations.
Let's welcome Rosa Alcalá up to read for us.
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]