lip wolf
by Laura Solórzano
Translated by Jen Hofer.
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies.
ISBN: 9780976569275
1 August 2007
$14
Readers beware. You are about to go into the lion’s den. […]There’s no room for nonsense: Solórzano seems to have no interest in dazzling the reader with her prodigious linguistic performance or her defiance of challenging self-imposed constraints. Her diction is unerringly original yet it is also continues the often forgotten legacy of some of the masters of the Latin American historical avant-garde such as Oliverio Girondo, from Argentina, and the Mexican Xavier Villaurritia. How fortunate is she to have her poems be in the hands of Jen Hofer, as judicious a translator as anyone would ever hope for. Her account of the never-ending process of translation evinces just how much thought goes into every one of her choices. And how fortunate are we: she’s been brave and generous enough to venture into the lion’s den just for the sake of sharing this striking work with English-language readers.
– Mónica de la Torre
“wolf speaks for the wound, the wound is a mouth. the mouth a memory–wolf has lips of the future. the page is its steppe–wolf of bifid tongue that enlivens two languages–world in two voices: it stalks in one, sniggs, tracks in the other. once again licks the lip of the wound–wolf among ruins of words, between landslides and remnants of words–nomad, vandal wolf–indefatigable predator wolf–wolf of future lip: laura and jen invent it as they name it.”
– Jorge Esquinea
REVIEWS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Solórzano was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1961. She currently runs a small independent business as a textiles artisan in Guadalajara. Her poems have been published in various Mexican literary journals, most recently in Hoja Frugal (available free of cost from the editor, Dolores Dorantes, at [email protected]); her most recent books are lobo de labio (chapbook, Serie poesía, Cuadernos de filodecaballos, Guadalajara: 2001) and Semilla de Ficus (Ediciones Rimbaud, Tlaxcala: 1999).
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Jen Hofer is the editor and translator of an anthology of contemporary poetry by Mexican women which will be co-published by University of Pittsburgh Press and Ediciones Sin Nombre in 2003. Her other works include “Laws,” the July 2001 issue of A.BACUS, and The 3:15 Experiment, in conjunction with Lee Ann Brown, Danika Dinsmore and Bernadette Mayer (The Owl Press, 2001). Her first book of poems, Slide Rule, will be published by subpress in March 2002. Recent poems, translations and collaborations can be found in forthcoming issues of Antennae, Aufgabe, Chain, Kenning and Tripwire.