In homage to the dialogic motion of poetry and also to Gen X.
Mixed by Olivia Lott
Mixtape #1 is loss and warmth. Blood, veins, arteries. Faces, throats, wombs. Repetitions, questions, obsessions. Beside, beyond, behind, inside. One translation of contemporary poetry among infinite others. It’s a reminder that not one of these poems was originally written in English. It’s sitting with the artistry of translators and doing something with it. Most of all, it’s an invitation. To read, to keep mixing.
To be read in order.
Track 1. From Alphabet (1981) by Inger Christensen. Translated from Danish by Susanna Nied. New Directions, 2001.
Track 2. From “Letter to My Mother” (1987) by Juan Gelman. Translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, edited by Raúl Zurita and Forrest Gander. Copper Canyon, 2014.
Track 3. From sense violence (2013) by Helena Boberg. Translated from Swedish by Johannes Göransson. Black Ocean, 2020.
Track 4. From “Death Swarmswarms: Day Thirty-Four” (2016) by Kim Hyesoon. Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi. Autobiography of Death. New Directions, 2018.
Track 5. From “Vast Blue” (1976) by Amanda Berenguer. Translated from Spanish by Urayoán Noel. Materia Prima, edited by Kristin Dykstra and Kent Johnson. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019.
Track 6. From Third Millennium Heart (2017) by Ursula Andkjær Olsen. Translated from Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. Action Books, 2017.
Track 7. From “lagoonal calendar” (1976) by Aimé Césaire. Translated from French by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. University of California Press, 1998.
Track 8. From “Barbarian” (1969) by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. Translated from French by Conor Bracken. Scorpionic Sun. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019.
Olivia Lott curates Poesía en acción on the Action Books blog. She is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (forthcoming, Eulalia Books) and the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions). She is ABD in Hispanic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is writing her dissertation, “Radical Re/Turns: Translation and Revolution in Latin American Neo-Avant-Garde Poetics, 1959-1973.” Twitter: @oliviamlott