1. How did you start translating Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s work? What drew you to it?
I have been a fan of Delgado’s poetry since I first encountered her work while reading the anthology 4M3RIC4 and encountering her workshop and publication La Impresora. When I reached out to her about translating her poetry and she shared her chapbooks El eco de las formas and Poemas para megáfono, I was really excited by the opportunity to translate both works to put them directly in conversation with each other. “cool confessional garden rockabilly kit[s]chen erotic poem no. 1” opens Poemas para megáfono, which is dedicated to her time and collaborators in the Mexico City-based transnational feminist poetry collective Poetas del megáfono. I was immediately drawn to the title and how, just like the title conveys, Delgado draws together elements that are found in her poetry across her career, ranging from reflecting on past relationships to politics and individuals to direct comments on language, poetry, and translation.
2. What are some of the main challenges you’ve encountered translating this work?
Something I consciously focus on while I continue to revise my translations of Poemas para megáfono and this poem in particular is maintaining the tone of Delgado’s poetic voice across the different verses of this piece and making it consistent with her other work. There’s casualness and complexity to her tone that, like the subjects of her poems themselves, resist being reduced to a single characteristic or category, and that has always been important to me to convey in my translation. One of my favorite details of this poem in particular is the double meaning that Delgado constructs within “fradu/lentamente,” and I really enjoyed the challenge of similarly splitting and doubling the English. Out of the list of English split-word combinations I formed for the translation, “decepti/slowly” most blurs the lines between the difference in experiences of reading the poem from the page or aloud as well and imposes the slash as an interruption in the fusion between the two English words as Delgado does seamlessly in the original.
3. What are you reading right now?
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of different works at once. I just reread Atsuro Riley’s Romey’s Order, because his method of constructing hybrid English words reminds me of Jorgenrique Adoum’s strategy of reinventing language in prepoems in postspanish, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. I keep rereading poems from E.J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s translation of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle by Yi Won, it’s been difficult to put it down without continuing to ruminate on humans’ relationships with each other and technology. I’m so lucky to be working with Ilan Magnani on their upcoming chapbook with Sunset Press, and so I’ve been able to read a lot of their experimental poetry before it comes out this spring.
Sarah Pazen is a poet, translator, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in EX/POST Magazine, The Tulane Review, Packingtown Review, A medio camino, and more. She is currently an undergraduate at Kenyon College where she is in her senior year studying Modern Languages and Literatures. In addition to working as the Visual Art and Design Intern at the Kenyon Review, she is the co-editor-in-chief of HIKA Magazine and a book designer for Sunset Press. She can be found on Twitter @COPINGSKILLS
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.