Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz are translating Max Rojas’s Bodies (Cuerpos). Poesía en acción published an excerpt earlier this month.
How did you start working on this project? What drew you to it?
ZK: I saw a stack of the 2008 collected edition of Rojas’s Cuerpos in a bookstore in Mexico City in the summer of 2018, and I was immediately drawn to it based on its enormous size. Too much time spent studying Pound, Williams, and Olson at a formative age has made me a sucker for hefty books of poetry. But I didn’t buy it when I saw it. Instead, I spent two weeks regretting the missed opportunity, and eventually had to track it down on my last day in the city before flying home. I was drawn to the mystery of it—it seemed esoteric and strange, and was definitely beyond the grasp of my limited Spanish. The only way to read it, was to translate it. But even then, my translations didn’t really make sense, so I knew I needed more help.
GSC: Zane told me about how he had begun translating Rojas and eventually shared his translation. I had heard of Rojas yet hadn’t encountered Cuerpos—as soon as I got a hold of the book I was hooked too and began collaborating with Zane. The monumental aspect of the endeavor was daunting and appealing at once; perhaps I was already channeling some of the energy with which Rojas’s poetry unfolds, but it felt like the book was imposing its terms of engagement and they were very inviting.
What are some of the main challenges you’ve encountered in translating this work?
ZK: Rojas often works with very long, winding syntax that can make it quite difficult to follow and can make antecedents and pronouns quite unclear. He also—and this is something I didn’t realize until Gerónimo started helping—has a prodigious tendency toward creating neologisms. I had been assuming they were all just words that weren’t in the dictionary I was using, and I trying my best to translate them as if they were normal words by using whatever seemed closest.
GSC: The singularity of Rojas’s prosody also comes to mind as a specifically challenging feature to translate. Similarly, his lexicon is so meticulous and becomes essential for the kinds of atmospheres and moods his poetry creates; finding the proper register when translating is an arduous labor, but finding the proper soundscape, with pertinent textures and sociocultural referents, is so difficult that it almost invites a creating anew—though obviously with the very high stakes that the terms of engagement demand.
What are you reading right now?
ZK: Right now, I’m reading a lot of José Emilio Pacheco for the dissertation chapter I’m working on. And books on fly fishing, to distract from all the dissertation reading. That’s mostly it for the moment.
GSC: I’m reading Tonya M. Foster’s A Swarm of Bees in High Court, which I’m currently teaching in a creative writing class, and Roberto Harrison’s Tropical Lung.
Zane Koss is a poet, translator, and scholar. His critical and creative work can be found in tripwire, Asymptote, Jacket2, the Chicago Review, the /temz/ Review, and elsewhere. He has published four chapbooks of poetry, The Odes (incomplete) and Invermere Grids (above/ground, 2020 and 2019), job site (Blasted Tree, 2018) and Warehouse Zone (PS Guelph, 2015).
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz is a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and editor of Chicago Review. His translations, poetry, and criticism have appeared in tripwire, Denver Quarterly, Asymptote, La Tempestad, Chicago Review, and elsewhere.
Poesía en acción is an Action Books blog feature for Latin American and Spanish poetry in translation and the translator micro-interview series. It was created by Katherine M. Hedeen and is currently curated and edited by Olivia Lott with web editing by Paul Cunningham.