When I started this.
Good evening, everyone.
We welcome tonight a truly international writer,
one whose work has taken her not only between Mexico
and the United States, but to Asia, South America, and Europe
to do her own writing.
Support the writing of others.
Other times to join together with others
in platica, conversation, made all the more pleasurable,
I'm sure, by the makeup and the background of the audience
to whom she's speaking.
What do I mean by that?
I'm thinking of what it means for the English language
publishing world and even the world of cinema
to remain so steadfast against other dominant narratives.
Writers like Brenda Lozano help us understand that no culture
or country is central.
Indeed, no history is either.
The more we open ourselves to how stories are told
and how we receive them, the hope
is we preserve and refine language altogether.
By testing expressions against each other
and ponder the places where the untranslatable exists and still
manages to tell us something.
That word untranslatable, I'm stealing it
from this really wonderful introductory essay to Brenda
Lozano's which is available over there on that table
by her translator, Heather Cleary, which
invites us to think about not only untranslatable words
and phrases, but how many of them
exist in our considerations of gender and misogyny.
At the heart of this book's split
narratives are a journalist, Zoe, and a community healer,
Feliciana, and how these two lives in the world
shed light on the character of Paloma.
That's what you'll learn about if you
read this book, whose murder is traced
through this narrative not as a suspense narrative,
but as one that reveals something
to us about the dark nature of knowledge and secrets
and the preciousness of what we're
able to pass on to each other.
So yes, this is a book about violence.
It's violence of body and of community,
but it is also cognizant of the potential healing
of that violence through language, struggling
to find the words that must document and witness rather
than suppress.
So beautiful line in this book, and it'll
give you an indication of what you have in store tonight.
Quote, ''Even as two people try to understand each other
in the same tongue, they can't.
One person understands one thing and the other person
understands something else.
And that is why the language is as broad and as vast
as the present.''
This evening invites us to think about what
is translatable between cultures,
between experiences, between ages, the differences made
visible by the power, and the service of translation.
For this evening, we thank the poetry center as always,
the creative writing program and the English Department,
and most especially the Borchard Foundation that Tyler mentioned
earlier, the center on literary arts and their mission that I
want to say one more time, quote,
''Create a community of literary artists from across the Americas
to foster meaningful connections between people, culture,
and the natural world.''
So on behalf of everyone here in Tucson,
una bienvenida to Brenda Lozano.
[APPLAUSE]