Hi.
I also had a lot of red meat.
[LAUGHTER]
We all did.
I think we all got the special, right?
Kelsi, that was really beautiful, Spanish
and sometimes Swedish?
That's pretty impressive.
And, you know, Valesa started in El Paso.
I mean, it's still mainly--
and one of the editors is a former student of mine.
Yeah, so that's a nice connection as well.
Thank you.
It's so nice to be here.
I have a lot of connections with people in Tucson, friends,
former students, future friends, I hope, as well.
I'm staying in the Poet's Cottage, which
is pretty amazing to be there.
So I feel very honored to be invited.
And I was saying at dinner that it's especially rare
to be invited to do something in which the focus is translation.
I mean, I'm invited to give talks about translation
or to give workshops, but to come here and read
my translations, and for that to be the focus,
is very special for me.
And also, the acknowledgment that I'm
a poet, that my translation work isn't just
translating other people's work, but that there's
an intimate relationship between my translation
work and my poetry.
And that, in fact, as the daughter of immigrants,
of parents who didn't speak English at home,
that, really, the origins of my work are in translation.
I think I became a translator because I was constantly
mediating between various worlds and various languages,
and also languages of class, which come up in my work a lot
too.
So, yes, I want to thank the University of Arizona
and the Poetry Center.
I want to especially thank Diana Delgado, who
has been so wonderful in coordinating my visit.
Her book, Tracing the Horse, is really amazing.
So get ye to the bookstore--
[LAUGHTER]
--and buy that book right away.
Tyler, I met you a long time ago.
You're really wonderful.
And thank you for the wonderful dinner.
So, the Hannelore Quander-Ratee--
am I pronouncing it correctly?
I hope I am.
I hope that this reading honors her.
Thank you.
So I'm going to start with some translations
and then read some of my own work.
I'm going to time myself.
We were talking about how rare it
is to have 40 minutes to read.
And I'm never going to do a reading for less
than 40 minutes from now on.
[LAUGHTER]
I've gotten a taste.
OK.
So I'm going to read from that big book that's there.
[LAUGHTER]
Can everyone hear me OK?
Yeah.
OK.
Get my glasses too.
I think one of the cruelties of getting older
is that you can't read your own books without these glasses you
buy at Walgreens, right?
So I'm going to read some poems.
Let me see what time it is.
So, it's 7:15.
That means a little bit before 8:00, right?
OK.
So I'm going to start reading some poems that Cecilia Vicuña
wrote in the 1960s and early '70s.
And so, these are poems that she wrote before she
went to England on scholarship.
She had a painting scholarship in England.
And she moved there right before the Chilean coup.
And the Chilean coup took place on September 11, 1973.
And she had a contract with the Universidad Católica in Chile,
to publish her first book, called, Saborami.
And it took a really long time to publish,
and she wasn't sure why it wasn't being published.
And she was in London at the time.
And she thought there was the regular publishing
delays that we're all aware of.
But the coup happened, and it never came to be.
And she published a small book, also called Saborami,
in England, that was published by Beaux Geste Press, which
was a version of that original manuscript.
But the original manuscript was lost.
And it was reconstructed in 2013.
Juliet Lynd did this work where she also researched
what possibly happened to the manuscript.
So it's possible that the military destroyed it or, even
before the Chilean coup, the rector of the Universidad
Católica, according to Lynd's research,
was really disturbed by the erotic and anti-ecclesiastical
content of the book and censored it.
So, these are poems from that book, from that original book.