curated by Katherine M. Hedeen
Reviewing poetry in translation
- recognizes translators as authors
- destabilizes narrow definitions of originality, authenticity, and authorship
- makes visible the artistry of translation
- is dissent, defiance, disobedience, subversion, solidarity
Aase Berg. Aase’s Death.
Trans. Johannes Göransson,
Black Ocean, 2025. 180 pages. $20.
Yoo Heekyung. Today’s Morning Vocabulary.
Trans. Stine An.
Zephyr Press, 2025. 120 pages. $19.
“I am at a loss” writes Yoo Heekyung—through translator Stine An—in his debut poetry collection Today’s Morning Vocabulary. This admission of loss punctuates the collection not only as an announcement of emotion, but also as a declaration of location. Surrounding Heekyung’s “loss” is a vocabulary rife with depletion and separation, a language built out of distances that cannot be closed. In the poem “erasable map,” the speaker considers his “arid career of tearing open envelopes,” a gesture which suggests the arduous and tiresome reception of missives, while in the poem “K” he constructs an identity for a person seen in passing— one whose self and thoughts are unknowable to them. Such figures drift in and out of the speaker’s periphery, bringing to the work a sense of the photographic; the image the photographer wishes to make or perhaps sees, yet fails to make. Today’s Morning Vocabulary is, above all, a work of navigation and transit. Heekyung’s speaker navigates within/through grief and its subsequent melancholy, always tracing the contours of absence.
As the work continues to remind us, “I am at a loss.” Heekyung heightens this location, this un-motion, through exertions over the physical world. Though we wait for “another train [to] arrive from the city,” we are bereft of company, alone on the platform because “no one is waiting to board” here, “at night everyone lies down alone.” This loneliness is replete with unrequited love. In some cases, as in “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” the love is unrequited due to an irreconcilable gap. Speaker and beloved sit with their “shadows scattered into uncertainty.” Ultimately the day and its disappointment cannot be traveled further; its transit is no longer viable and so the speaker admits that they “have never felt at home with this today that cannot be traveled further.”
All this makes one ask: where, if anywhere, is the location of loss in Today’s Morning Vocabulary? For Heekyung, it would seem to be at some point between here and there, as in “Friday,” where the speaker imagines a funereal scene featuring “people dressed in black,” in the midst of composition— a moment in which they become acutely aware of their “powerlessness.” Heekyung’s melancholy, the time that is “the time for [him] to weep [himself] is an interstitial sea; it is the place/time where/when the speaker’s “chest and back try to embrace.”
If we tilt our ears to the sound of Yoo Heekyung’s Today’s Morning Vocabulary, we are sure to hear its crying. But what’s more is that we are sure to leave with a vocabulary fit to survive our own mourning. (JT)
Tahar Ben Jelloun. Sun Scars.
Trans. Jake Syersak.
Diálogos Books, 2025. 110 pages. $23.95.
A major ethical consideration of our time circles around the question of narrative. Who controls the stories that govern our lives? Or, on a more fundamental level, Who writes history?
The question has been asked so often, it seems, that it has worn grooves into the collective consciousness. It has provided a foundation and direction for postcolonial considerations into the present, influencing social movements and generations of thinkers and activists.
Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Sun Scars—rendered into English by Jake Syersak—is deeply concerned with these questions. From poem to poem, we are presented with an alternative history to those told even today by certain Western powers. The poems give voice instead to a people exploited and tyrannized by a colonizing power—in this case by the French colonizers present in Morocco from 1912 to 1956.
First released in 1972 by Éditions Maspero—the same press that published Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ten years earlier—Sun Scars is not only a literary triumph, it is an important historical document: a product of a time and place, in which government abuses were rampant, police repression violent, and the echoes of colonial rule hardly ten years in the past.
As translator Jake Syersak notes in his introduction, many of these poems were written in the late 1960s, when Ben Jelloun was imprisoned and tortured by the Moroccan government for his purported activities as a political dissident. Reading them, one has the impression of the poet in the eye of the storm, continuing to write as the wind threatens to tear his pages from his hands, as he watches destruction unfold all around him.
The last poem in the collection particularly, “The Tigers Writhe in Agony,” serves as the culminating point of the outrage that has built throughout the text, the crystalizing moment in which Ben Jelloun confronts the histories imposed by generations of oppressors, calling for collective action, for organized revolt:
L’Afrique a déposé dans nos veines de ce sang qui bout
sang prodigue
qui monte comme la fièvre
qui fait pâlir le missionnaire
qui fait tomber le masque
sang indigène à avaler
sang qui jaillit sous le talon de l’orage
chante sur les eaux de l’été
la désobéissance aux quatre coins de la fraternité
sang brasier à sécher nos cicatrices
à frôler le souvenir
sang brasier
c’est l’heure du siège et du désordre
interroge la terre et le buisson
It was Africa that ran this boiling blood through our veins
a prodigious blood
rising like a fever
and draining the color from the missionary’s face
lifting the veil
a native blood made for swallowing
a blood gushing forth from under the storm’s heel
singing up and over the seas of summer
in voices of unwilling to the far reaches of fraternity
a blaze-blood to dry our scars
to graze memory
a blaze-blood
now is the time for seizing and for disorder
for questioning the earth and the burning bush (106)
By “questioning the earth and the burning bush,” one hears echoes of the biblical language imposed by colonial missionaries not only in Morocco, but across the continent. Ben Jelloun faces down this external, exploitative presence, pushing back against these Western narratives and calling for an uprising of the people: “now is the time for seizing and for disorder.”
Ultimately, Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of the great living Francophone writers for a reason: a masterful, incisive lyricism, an unflinching treatment of individual and collective trauma, and an unceasing questioning of dominant narratives.
His works continued to resonate with new generations of readers, of thinkers, of all those interested in decentering dominant narratives, and this new edition is an opportunity to expand the ever-growing postcolonial corpus available in English.
As the collection draws to a close, after examining the consequences of systemic violence with his unflinching gaze, Ben Jelloun allows for a glimmer of hope, for the possibility of moving forward despite everything that both the individual and the collective have survived:
L’homme sinistré se relève.
Man, beaten down, rises once more.
(CF)
Katrine Øgaard Jensen in collaboration with Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, Paul Cunningham, Baba Badji, and CAConrad.
Ancient Algorithms.
Sarabande Books, 2025, 114pp. $17.95.
I don’t know how to define this collection, and that’s delightful: it exceeds any categorisation. The poems in Ancient Algorithms are translations, mistranslations, collaborations, investigations, refractions, reverberations, transcreations, wonderisations, permeabilisations, dreamisations, dramaticisations, mobilisations, transformations, algorithmicising, pollinations, and malleableisations of language. I can go on. The constraint-based, rule-based, play-based languagesation of these translations enriches the imaginative extensions of the collection’s collaborative poesis.
If, as Katrine Øgaard Jensen writes, “[a]ll writing is translation” and [a]ll writing is collaboration,” then these poems and their travels through the bodyminds of Jenson-Olsen-Nakayasu-Machado-Cunningham-Badji-CAConrad offer a multitude of meetings, encounterings, desirings, wantings, birthings, holdings, discoursing, belongings, hatchings, pausings, makings, connectings, and worldings, where a poet translates an idea and the poem translates the poet. Here is one random example of these mobile encounters in just a couple of lines of poetry: “Det 3. årtusindes hjerte er et / sted med mange kamre” (Olsen), “The third-millennium heart is a / place of many chambers” ( Jensen’s translation of Olsen), “I am the third-millennium hero of compromised / infrastructure” (Jensen), “I am absurd, aquarium, zero-compromised” (Olsen), “I will break through hell with / birds and uranium elf” (Jenson), and “I will penetrate the underworld with my / peacocks and my heavy metal elves” (Olsen). This back-and-forth exchange between bodyminds fosters a novel community of ideas, where everyone is a poet and every poet is a translator.
Do I make sense? In World Literature Today, Jensen describes her decision to “transform and (mis)translate” many of the poems in Olsen’s collection Third-Millenium Heart “to make them more impactful (or just more fun) in English.” I want more fun poems. But as much as the poems in Ancient Algorithms are agile in these gambols, they also insist upon translation as a necessary creative provocation. Such creative experimentations feel especially urgent today given the increasing chatGPTisation of public rhetoric in the US. The porosity of these particular translations through the poets’ self-defined rules rejects any regulated control imposed by an AI that claims to offer the most “reliable” and the most “accurate” translation of language. Naturally, then, I am all for Ancient Algorithms’ bold hybrid-animals. I want to see more of them. (OT)
César Moro. The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems.
Trans. Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe.
Cardboard House Press, 2025. 172 pages. $19.95.
The Equestrian Turtle and Other Poems is Cesar Moro’s heart-shattering “book of psalms” to an indifferent lover, brought to us in English for the first time by translators Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe. A central figure in the trans-Atlantic avant gardes of the twentieth century, Moro (Perú, 1903-1956) was a queer painter, art critic, translator, and poet largely responsible for bringing the French surrealist movement to Latin America. This translation of La tortuga ecuestre (Moro’s only book in Spanish) represents a key step in the recognition of his influence and poetic genius.
The book begins with an introduction by the translators, followed by the main text as Moro organized it in 1940, additional poems from his first manuscript in 1938, some additional poems Moro had written separately, and finally, his love letters to Mexican army officer Antonio Acosta. The introduction provides useful insight into the translation process; Bary and Quispe strove to retranslate with the understanding that Moro “created his own identity as a translated person, working across and between languages throughout his life.” Moreover, this is a translation that prioritizes the image. Far from reflecting a neglect of form on the part of the translators, I would argue that this approach reveals a decision to allocate energy toward the core of what makes Moro’s poetry so impactful. The art of translation is, after all, a series of careful decisions.
From the first poem of The Equestrian Turtle, the reader is swept away by Moro’s quick (dis)association of images like a flood. Much of this effect hinges on a lack of punctuation, which Bary and Quispe mostly recreate (adding the occasional comma). As we drown in this ocean of images, language pulls apart, only to be reconfigured in a surrealist abstraction of the self in love: “This rain falls from high above / And encloses me alone inside of you / Inside and far away from you / Like a path that disappears into another continent” (33). Time also stretches and compresses: “[…] the day is a large cycle of centuries that seems like an instant when your presence manifests itself; the rest of the time it is night” (139). Interestingly, Moro’s lover is not an active member of these poems. He is both absent and present, like a thing on display that has been dead for thousands of years: “The smoke returns and gathers itself to create tangible representations of your / absent presence” (35).
Ultimately, what is most striking about this book is the proximity of language to love. “I can give you any name: sky, life, alphabet, air that I breathe” (125), writes Moro. Naming is the fundamental function of language, and love, in Moro’s poetry, is the infinite use of language. Uttering a word–giving a name–is an act of love. What better way to celebrate this idea than in translation? (MK)
Zaira Pacheco. Waking in the Sahara.
Trans. Lauren Shapiro.
Eulalia Books, 2024. 160 pages. $18.00.
Puerto Rican professor and writer Zaira Pacheco’s English debut, rendered by Lauren Shapiro’s ear toward absence and silence, transports the reader to a vast poetic landscape by turns empty and teeming with presence. Divided into two sections and appearing in both Spanish and English, the first part, “Mirages,” takes the reader through a desert cast into contrast of light and shadow of equal intensity. Shapiro’s translation is sharp with intention. Where fire displays its simultaneous destructiveness and passion, Shapiro strikes a delicate linguistic balance.
An explosion booms. / The loose bricks reach your mouth / and wake the fire. / I emblaze you. (39)
As Shapiro mentions in her introduction, not shying from addressing the difficulties of this translation, Pacheco creates landscapes out of negative space. Human traces in the desert are part of the landscape rather than an exception to it. The emptiness takes on a life and substance of its own. Shapiro’s English valiantly engages the variety of Spanish’s darkness, emptiness, and absence.
A universe of inanimate things / that have disintegrated / without turning to dust. / Space is empty of loss. / There isn’t. (24)
In the second part, “Desert, I Tell You,” Pacheco and Shapiro introduce the reader to a primordial landscape already marked by ruin. At the same time that the poem evokes an ancient beginning, the world already starts to disintegrate into the future; a disappearance looms on the horizon. But in this context, this is merely another stage of the desert, and with it comes a sense of peace.
The flood has engulfed it, / the liveforevers. / I know I have nowhere to go. / I want to stay in this desert. (79)
This is not the only paradox. Desolation and the sense of being cast adrift abound, but the self is not lost. Rather, the poems offer a sense of a self that knows how to float in the currents of time as the desert changes its many faces. Only a self that adapts with the cycles of birth and destruction, that can fondly regard the past but also knows to let it go, can remain as assured as the one offered to us here.
After the journey / I haven’t yet arrived home. / I know that the journey / has nothing to do with me. / Nor the home. (73)
Present throughout are the act of witnessing the desert and one’s own life in addition to the sense of leaving impermanent evidence of one’s passing. Whether through diaries, photographs, man-made lights, debris, or even a reptilian feeling or memory, the presence of human life in this desolate land is undeniable. But like everything in the desert, this, too, like the mist must evaporate, or like the most ardent fire go out. Pacheco and Shapiro promise that this disappearance is only another face of the desert to be faced without fear.
A few photographs of the sea remain. / The daybreak. / The light of a meteor / that disintegrates / before it gets here. (57)
(JC)
Liliana Ponce. Theory of the Voice and Dream.
Trans. Michael Martin Shea.
World Poetry Books, 2025. 198 pages. $22.00
“I write. I write signs. I write death. I write another. I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.” With this final passage of “Fudekara,” the closing poem of Theory of the Voice and Dream, translator Michael Martin Shea shows us the impetus of Liliana Ponce’s poetics. To Ponce, writing is a form of living, a testament to experiencing the world through language, even when the body may not be ready for it, even when it shows us something we may not want to know about ourselves or the world.
In Theory of the Voice and Dream, the writing process is an infinite, bittersweet journey towards meaning that requires devotion, patience, and being comfortable with the unknown. Ponce moves through her writing not with a precise goal, but trusting the liminal pleasure of the task itself, its endless continuation. She relies on nature-driven imagery and diary-like assemblages (with a poem fittingly titled “Diary”), to speak about creativity, desire, womanhood, personal identity, meaning-making, and more.
I am that breath, those fluid arms. / I breathe stuck to shining sheets, / orbit or cloud, even farther on. // I am the woman who flees / into material ponds. (…) // I am the dreaming woman, / I want to be the dream. (41)
What is it that begins again? Writing, wandering among warped desires in the ruins of other warped desires, distant now. I take up writing again—its anarchic joy, pleasing and inflexible in its demands. (121)
A scholar of Japanese literature, I saw a resemblance of Ponce’s hallmark writing style—prose-like, serial poems freckled with lyrical moments of intensity—with the zuihitsu form. This preoccupation with continuity, with building a perceptive, sensorial landscape that upends expectations of time and space—reminded me of “The Memory Field,” an essay by Diné poet Jake Skeets. Skeets writes, “[t]he field of the page becomes a kind of physio-textual landscape, and it’s the poet’s job to render a blank page into a literal field using language. The job of the poet is to apply spatial reverence both within the field of the page and the physical constructions beyond the poem.”
Ponce’s blank page is rendered into a field with delicate, sequential poems that revere language’s capacity to build unexpected, startling connections; a body-landscape tethered by language’s rich, mysterious alchemizations. Constructing language is Ponce’s way of constructing life.
To cross the threshold I place the host / on my tongue and let it pass through me. (…) // How to live, I say, / in the pallid light of the chasms / where name and thing permit no compare. (75)
But she understands that language is not a perfect foundation for building the meaning of living in a body: “And now language like the plot of death and possibilities, / Its ungraspability, the expiration of the spoke, / The undiscoverable of what’s written: / Mouth and voice cannot find each other.” (163) This tension—between what can be named with language and what remains ungraspable—is shown to be a core principle of Ponce’s poetics.
Theory of the Voice and Dream begins and ends in the attempt to define who Ponce is, what writing means to her, and what living encapsulates, but can never quite get there. This book reminds us that the creative process is what makes writing, and any artistic pursuit, worth our time and dedication. We’re not in the pursuit of poetry and art to obtain answers, to produce something tangible; we create because, in the journey, we may learn a thing or two about living. (NAH)
Idea Vilariño. No.
Trans. María José Zubieta.
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025. 72 pages. $20.00.
I would like to die
I I I
I.
What is that.
María José Zubieta’s translation of Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño’s No is a desublimation, a meditation on life as suffering and death as inevitable—an extinguishment inaugurated by an often solitary period. A profound negativity defines her poems, which manifest as a sort of wound: a feminine pain and a female grammar, denuded but not helpless. Indeed, the violence of the pessimistic language constitutes its very beauty. Vilariño writes
Like a wispy jasmine blossom
that falls clinging to the air
that falls falls
falls.
What else would it do.
A will for repetition characterizes the collection, challenging not just structures of grammar and language, but structure in and of itself: of power, life and death, men over women. Vilariño’s poetry is a fatigue unto life comprising its own mechanism of resistance. Her poetic voice proffers her nonconsent. Tragedy flowers as a simple image that repeats. Repetition, like a supplication, weak though, knowing itself futile—what point is there but to write. To write for and against the hopelessness; to write in the direction of death. No: an appeal to the abyss, a struggle with a white space that swallows. In “Epitaph,” she asks
To not abuse words
to not pay them
undue attention.
The simple fact that
it was finished.
Was I finished?
A force
an honest passion and a desire
a vulgar desire
to go on.
It was simply that.
Vilariño writes in an open-ended, almost incomplete style. Simple sentences enjamb. Numbers replace titles—their occasional eruption an italic punch to the gut. Periods bracket interrogatives: this is a question that is not a question. A question that knows its own answer, in the direction of tragedy. It asks, rather, why can’t it be a question? Of course, the response is always enclosed by that period, a single dot which is, perhaps, death.
It is the mercy of the translator not to smooth out her poet’s idiosyncrasies, to rather recognize their intentionality: a tenderness women writers are not always afforded. Zubieta’s delicate and respectful recreation manifests, above all, in her ability to render a negative and exhausted flow. But so often, in translation, is the question one of preservation: a mechanical and financial affair that erases the translator’s labor. No asks instead, without the interrogative, of course: there is an author. There is a translator. There is white space. There is this hopeless resistance. There is this pen. Where the Spanish extends an economy of lowercase, the English capital “I” represents an irruption of the voice of the translator: Zubieta, whose soft resistance joins Vilariño’s tired one. Also, eye, that unique relationship of a translator to her author: you I see completely, you I must learn to understand. Vilariño says:
Eyes
You are nothing but eyes
that are going to die
are dying.
Your eyes
your antennae
your sweet devices.
To conclude in Vilariño’s same finality:
If you were to die […]
and I were to die
and the dog
how cleansing.
(TW)
Nicole Arocho Hernández is the author of you say my country is a tax incentive (Veliz Books, 2027). Their writing can be found in Poetry Northwest, Poets.org, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, they are a Kenyon Review Fellow and live in Gambier, OH.
Julia Conner is a Chinese American translator and language editor from the US South. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, ANMLY, MAYDAY, among others.
Chloe Farrell is a Paris-based writer, translator and photographer. They have written reviews for the Kenyon Review, were the recipient of Kenyon College’s John Crowe Ransom prize for poetry, and participated in the 2021 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Connect with them on Instagram at @horscontexte
Madeline Kwasnick is a translator from Charlottesville, Virginia translating from Spanish to English. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote and MAYDAY. She is a master’s student at the University of Oxford.
Joshua Thermidor is a writer and visual artist of the Haitian diaspora who believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of all oppressed people. He currently serves as Editor of Creative Nonfiction at Brink Literary and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of this abattoir is a college (2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (2019) as well as several chapbooks, including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (2023). She is the William P. Rice Associate Professor in Literature at Kenyon College.
Tia Wagner is a Kenyon student, aspiring creative writer, and amateur translator temporarily based in Ohio. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Iowa’s Wilder Things, WashU’s Spires, Kenyon’s Lacuna, and undergraduate journals Hika, Persimmons, and more.
Originally from Mississippi, Hannah V Warren is a poet, translator, and scholar living between Birmingham, Alabama, and Gambier, Ohio, as a Kenyon Review Fellow. She is the author of the poetry collection Slaughterhouse for Old Wive’s Tales and two chapbooks. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Denver Quarterly, among others.