Hi, Rosa.
Hi, Gabe.
So when you were reading the Cecilia Vicuna translations,
I kept hearing echoes of poems that I
love from Monica de la Torre, I think Daniel Borzutzky also.
And there's this thread of playfulness,
also light and darkness, seriousness
mixed with being funny.
And then I'm not sure what my question is,
but I'm coming from that, right?
But I mean, do you see that also?
Am I making that up?
No, I read with Monica de la Torre.
She's a poet and translator.
And I read here in Tucson not too long--
I mean, it was maybe a couple of years ago.
And she read it from her new book--
what is it called?
The happy-- it's happy something.
I'm trying to remember the title of it.
But she has all of these--
she has like a poem to a-- what is it called?
An aeron chair, those famous chairs, says aeron chair.
So she has a poem that's about that chair.
And she has these list of interview questions.
And it's all about the ridiculousness of this sort
of corporate environment.
And so after the reading, I said--
no actually, she read first.
And then when I read, I read the translation
of the "New Erotic Designs for Furniture" poem.
And she didn't know about that poem.
But it was an interesting connection between those two.
But I think that there's--
Monica de la Torre and Daniel Borzutzky--
I mean Daniel Borzutzky also his family is Chilean
but he translates Raul Zurita who
is of the same generation as Cecilia Vicuna.
And they're all coming out of this avant garde
tradition of poetry, and also performance, and performances
as political and social activism.
So I think there's all these connections there.
And when we asked Daniel Borzutzky
to write the introduction to The New and Selected,
he was really excited because it's been-- she's
been such an influence for him.
And so it's interesting to create
these kind of genealogies, because it's not necessarily
that the work is always similar.
But there are these ways in which
they're being influenced by similar histories,
and also histories of like trauma, the history
the shared history of trauma that Daniel Borzutzky's
family shares with Cecilia because of the golpe de estado,
the coup d'etat in Chile.
But yeah, that's definitely there's
all those connections there for sure.
And then the bodies right?
I mean, the disappeared bodies.
I think that's maybe something else.
There's so many disappeared bodies.
And I think Borzutzky--
because there are so many disappeared bodies,
it isn't just like that their disappeared bodies
in her poems.
There are disappeared bodies in history.
And she mentions this too, it's like how many bodies disappear
in the poems, meaning that they never make it into the poems,
then they disappear.
So she's trying to acknowledge that the bodies that
are actually disappeared, how do you
make them present in the poems?
Thank you.
Thank you for that question.
Hi, Rosa.
Hi, Charles.
I wonder-- has your work been translated?
And if it has, how does that relate
to be the translated and not the translator?
And what have you learned from that experience?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So there's a poet in Cuba who's translated
some of Undocumentaries and published them.
And he sent me--
It's interesting he couldn't get the poems to me.
He had to send it through a friend.
The email in Cuba can sometimes be tricky.
But the two people who've been really working with my poems--
one is Andrea Cote-Botero who's a Colombian poet, who
teaches at UTEP.
And Paula Cucurella who's a Chilean poet, who's
also now teaching at UTEP.
And it's been an interesting experience.
And one of the things that I learned
from working with Cecilia Vicuna, Lila
Zemborain, and Lourdes Vazquez is that they really trusted me.
And they even trusted the growing pains
that I went through as a translator.
I started very young as a translator.
So even I was learning with them,
like I was learning to translate with their work.
And I think that requires a lot of trust.
But they allowed me to experiment
and to do different things.
And I mean in all of them.
I mean sometimes in the same room.
Cecilia has said this to me that I would do something
in the translation that made her want to change the original.
So it was very porous, that experience.
And so I think I tried to bring that to my experience
with working with translators of my work into Spanish.
And some of it has been translated into Portuguese.
It was just a few poems for Brazilian anthology.
But I find that--
I'm a Capricorn.
So I'm a control freak.
And Raquel Gutierrez was telling me there's the moon rise.
There's all the other rising and the things that go up
and things--
I don't know.
But she said there's this other part of me
that undercuts the Capricorn.
But I'm someone who really likes to control things.
So I don't think I'm as--
I think I do try to sometimes suggest things
as I'm seeing versions of it.
But I try to remember, I try to remember
that if all of these poets hadn't allowed me to experiment
and do those things, I wouldn't be the translator I am.
So to try not to jump into quickly,
to let them go through the process,
and then if I have a few suggestions
to make towards the end I do.
But it's a very odd thing.
And I realize now often when I've worked with these poets,
and I've asked them very direct questions.
Sometimes I was temping in the Wall Street area, when I first
started working as a translator for Cecilia Vicuna.
So I would walk over to her apartment.
This was like back--
I would fax translations to her.
I was like fax versions.
I did a lot on the boss's dime, I have to say.
I don't know, the former boss is not going to see this, right?
But I would just fax things.
And then I would meet her afterwards.
And she would have comments for me.
I forgot where I was going with this.
We were talking about giving freedom for doing this.
I don't know, what was I talking about?
So I went-- now, I'm like getting wrapped up
in my temping days.
None of that is important.
So yeah, I had such limited time.
That's what it was.
I had such limited time.
I was like working these jobs that
were not related to poetry.
And so I'd get to Cecilia's apartment.
And I would say, OK, I have all of these questions.
So like what is this word here?
What is this doing?
And if any of you -- have any of you met Cecilia Vicuna?
So she's not going to go directly to the answer.
So it's like sometimes things could be resolved quickly,
but these stories would start.
Her husband at the time would just be like,
you guys are not wrapping it up.
This is what's happened.
And so we go through these whole conversations.
And it didn't solve the problem.
And I think that I had this kind of mentality.
I was like I was paid.
Not by her by the hour, but I had
this idea this very American idea of efficiency.
And I went in there.
And it was like that's not the process
that she was looking for.
So I have to remember that, the resistance to that efficiency,
and letting the conversation take you
into unproductive areas.
And so yeah, I keep trying to remember that.
As a person, that's not my inclination.
I'm like that.
As my former students, probably know.
Yeah.
Hello, Professor Alcala Rosa.
I'm so happy to see you.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
OK, I have a question regarding poetry and translation as well.
So my question is how your work as a translator
affect your work as a poet.
I mean do you see in your artwork
any trace of Cecilia Vicuna or any other poet
that you have translated?
Yeah.
Yeah this is a question I get a lot.
And it's almost like when people tell you
your kid looks just like you.
And you're like-- she looks just like her father.
And I still feel that, whether my daughter
looks anything like me.
But I often don't see the similarity
if people point out these kind of things.
I will say that what Cecilia and I share
is work that is very focused on--
that has a certain amount of social and political awareness.
And I think that's one of the things that drew me to her work
initially, and one of the reasons I've
continued to work with her.
So I think that maybe some of our--
we have some shared concerns, although I think our aesthetic
is very different.
With Lila Zemborain, I translated a book of hers
with Monica de la Torre, we co-translated it,
called [SPEAKING SPANISH] Mauve Sea Orchids.
She writes all of these poems in which she reflects on--
she tries to capture the movement of her body
through water.
She's an avid swimmer.
And she has a house on--
I'm trying to remember, it's like part of the Hamptons.
So she calls it the unHamptons, the part that she's in.
It's like the more the ragged edges of the Hamp--
I forget what part it is.
But she would go swimming every day in the ocean.
And she wrote all of these poems about swimming,
her body moving through water.
And at that time, I was reading translation theory,
and reading a lot of postcolonial theory,
and translating her work.
And I wrote this book that brought
a lot of those theoretical references and also water
references into a poem, into a book called The Lust
of Unsentimental Waters.
And I didn't realize that was happening at the time.
It was until people started asking me that question.
I'm like, oh, of course.
That's how it came together.
And I think there's just this experience too,
I didn't plan it.
But I've done other things beside this.
But the poets that I focused on have
been Latin American women poets living in the US.
And there's something about being
a writer who's in this kind of liminal position.
Where she's, in some ways, really not publishing
in her own country in Spanish, but she's
in this place where she's expected to publish in English
but she writes in Spanish, and how does she kind of navigate
that, probably something that you're familiar with,
and some of the students in your program.
How do you bring those two worlds together.
And so I think there's a kind of affinity
of understanding that position of someone who's
caught between languages.
And I write a lot about that in my work too.
So sometimes affinity isn't clear.
Like I was thinking of Jack Spicer's After Lorca,
which we were just talking about in my class.
It's not that Spicer's work is like Lorca's, but you
could see why he chose to do that book, what
that affinity was.
And it wasn't just that he was like this representation
of someone cut down by fascism.
It was something else there.
Yeah Thank you.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]