Translation

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

April 3, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Translated by WENDY CALL & WHITNEY DEVOS

Poems appear below in English, and Spanish and Tutunakú, the original languages.

Translators’ Note

Poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez creates her work bilingually, in Spanish—the language in which she was educated—and in Tutunakú—the language in which she was raised. Tutunakú is the home language of approximately 220,000 people in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. It has multiple variants and Lucas Juárez seeks out speakers from different communities to expand her poetic vocabulary.

She generally begins writing in Tutunakú, but lines also come to her in Spanish, so she moves back and forth between the two versions of each poem, creating the bilingual pair simultaneously. “It’s two creation processes happening at the same time,” she says. Tutunakú is agglutinative, so it contains words up to a dozen syllables long that translate as whole phrases or sentences in Spanish. Her translation process must be “letter by letter, not word by word, because each word contains so much,” she explains. Tutunakú is also a highly metaphorical language: “being pregnant” translates to “I am not alone,” while “I miss you” translates literally as “My stomach is sinking.”

Although poetry is a regular part of Tutunakú cultural life, Lucas Juárez is the first woman to publish a book of poetry in the language. These poems are drawn from her 2021 debut collection, Xlaktsuman papa’ / Las hijas del Luno. The title, “Daughters of Luno,” uses the masculine version of the Spanish word for moon (luna). Luno is the metaphorical father of Tutunakú women.

We began co-translating “Daughters of Luno” in 2023, inspired by the depth of Lucas Juárez’ poetic voice, written when Lucas Juárez was in her early twenties. To create our English translations, we worked primarily from the Spanish, observing and listening to the Tutunakú versions, though neither of us has formally studied the language. We met with the poet in person and via video call, and also exchanged many messages. We are grateful for her patience, generosity, and linguistic expertise, all of which have been crucial to our process.

— Wendy Call & Whitney Devos

Table of Contents

Litutunaaku
Tantsulut Bird
The Voice of The Buried

“Litutunaaku” is the Tututnakú people’s name for themselves. The word translates as “people who belong to the culture of the three hearts,” referencing the brain (memory), the antomical heart (physical life), and the stomach (emotional experience). Together, these three interdependent “hearts” sustain Tutunakú “triple consciousness.” “Li,” the word’s first syllable, refers to a Tutunakú person’s homeplace—which is central to identity.

The Hare

March 6, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By ISMAEL RAMOS
Translated by JACOB ROGERS
Piece appears below in English and the original Galician.

Translator’s Note
Translating “The Hare,” by Ismael Ramos, was a perfect encapsulation of the idea that the hardest texts to translate are not necessarily the most maximalist or technical, but the sparest and most pared down. In his narration, Ramos keeps things moving at a brisk pace with gentle, light-footed prose dotted with sparks of lyricism. His dialogue is similarly effective, with sharp, often curt interchanges between the siblings Raúl and Valeria that maintain a tension that thrums under the surface of their car ride. And therein lies the challenge: if it were only a matter of reproducing sentences as lovely as these, that would be one thing; the hard part is that they need to be both lovely and charged with the electrical undercurrent of the unspoken, they need to lean on a word or intention in some places and lay off in others, just as brother and sister push and pull at each other. Or, as Raúl might put it, they metaphorical ping pong, deflecting and attacking and dissimulating.

Excerpt from Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl: Nahuatl Poems

February 24, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By NEZAHUALCÓYOTL

Retold by ILAN STAVANS

Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472) is the only pre-Hispanic Aztec poet we know by name. The word means “Hungry Coyote” in Nahuatl. But Nezahualcóyotl wasn’t solely a poet. He ruled the Texcocans, who, along with the city-states Tenochtitlán and Tlacopán, formed the magisterial Triple Alliance, which ruled from 1428 until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors almost a hundred years later. Nezahualcóyotl was also known for his philosophical meditations, his urban projects, especially aqueducts, and for his views on war, sacrifice, and the legal system.

Mantra 5

February 6, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By KRIKOR BELEDIAN
Translated by CHRISTOPHER MILLIS and TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

Piece appears below in English and the original Armenian.

Translators’ Note

The pervasive sense of place in Krikor Beledian’s works was forged in the crucible of displacement. Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide that Armenians refer to as the Catastrophe.

The pre-eminent writer of Western Armenian literature, Beledian is a long-time resident of Paris, where he has authored more than 30 volumes, including poetry, a 10-volume novel cycle still in progress, literary criticism, experimental prose, and literary history. And he has done so in the UNESCO-designated “endangered” language of Western Armenian.

“Mantra 5” is one of the 32 extended poems collected in Mantras. Beledian says that Mantra 5 was written from the tip of the Seine isle of Vert Gallant, which looks toward the Louvre and the metallic bridge of Pont des Arts. From this vantage point, the poem brings into its sphere multiple and often contradictory threads which are simultaneously at play, resulting in a fractured surface. Time and geography are superimposed on each other; just as the ruins of Palmyra appear in the Louvre, the shadowy dead of indeterminate origin course through the currents of the Seine and the Euphrates. The poem is both atonal dirge and palimpsest.

In the Preface to Mantras, Beledian writes that “place is exile, and exile is the original catastrophe.” The challenge of translating Beledian’s writing is its radical tenuousness—of place, time, and language itself. This is a complex undertaking because Western Armenian belongs to a culture nearly obliterated in 1915, a Catastrophe bookended by centuries of displacement. English, particularly American English, belongs to the culture of conquest and certainty: How to render into English a poetic language which is acutely aware of its calamitous biography, its indeterminate attributes, and its mandate to give voice to the unspoken, unseen, unknown?

— Christopher Millis and Taline Voskeritchian

January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

January 30, 2025 Poetry, Translation

Poems by RAFAEL ALBERTI
Translated from the Spanish by JOHN MURILLO

From Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels, forthcoming in March from Four Way Books.

Poems appear in both English and Spanish.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by John Murillo
LOS ÁNGELES VENGATIVOS (The Vengeful Angels)
CAN DE LLAMAS (Hound of Flames)
EL ÁNGEL TONTO (The Foolish Angel)
EL ÁNGEL DEL MISTERIO (The Angel of Mystery)
ASCENSIÓN (Ascension)

Grey Dumplings

January 9, 2025 Essays, Translation

By GRZEGORZ KASDEPKE
Translated from Polish by JONATHAN BAINES

Piece appears below in English and the original Polish.

Translator’s Note

The memoir-plus-bonus-recipe ‘Grey Dumplings’ by Grzegorz Kasdepke is taken from the volume Królik po islandzku (2022). When it appears in English, I hope it’ll have the title Icelandic Rabbit. It’s a collaboration with the novelist Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki. The two authors take it in turns to share a snapshot from their lives, each with a relevant recipe tacked on the end. The stories are accompanied by Aleksandra Cieślak’s striking illustrations. (Ask your search engine to show you the cover!) The short prose pieces are unfailingly comic, but there’s always something more serious going on as well. There are thirty vignettes – and thirty recipes – in total and an atmosphere of friendly competition as they stack up. Cumulatively, they paint a vivid picture of Polish life over the last several decades. ‘Grey Dumplings’ is the first of Kasdepke’s contributions. I was drawn to it by the same qualities that illuminate his writing for children: a lightly-worn irony and an exhilarating curiosity about the world.

— Jonathan Baines

Grey Dumplings

The smaller the flat, the more friction – literally and figuratively – between family members.

My parents lived in a small room in my grandparents’ flat. They were very young (as a child, of course, I didn’t appreciate that, but it’s clear to me now – and perhaps my father’s mustache did seem a little thin). It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, just until they were assigned their own three-bedroom flat on the Dziesięciny estate in Białystok. It went on for ten years. Goethe would have seen the beauty in this, at least from my childish point-of-view. One two-roomed flat and three generations: that’s the real magic of numbers, don’t you think?

Translation: Side Entrance to the House

December 5, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By AMAL AL SAEEDI
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN

Piece appears below in English. To view the original Arabic, please click here.

Translator’s note:

Amal al Saeedi’s Side Entrance to the House immediately caught my attention. For one, literature that centers the house intrigues me; perhaps it’s the innate mystery held within the brick walls that surrounds us, the way it enfolds us, inhabiting us as much as we inhabit it. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, The House with Only an Attic and a Cellar, by Kathryn Maris, Laura Scott’s So Many Rooms, Eman Abderahim’s Rooms and Other Stories, have all lured me in by the title first.

Silk Road

November 7, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By NIEVES GARCÍA BENITO
Translated by CARMELA FERRADÁNS

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

“Silk Road” is one of twelve short stories in Nieves García Benito’s collection By Way of Tarifa (Por la vía de Tarifa), originally published in 1999.

Forced migration and human trafficking are two of the most pressing humanitarian issues in the world today. In the Mediterranean alone, thousands of people travel across the Straits of Gibraltar every year on their way to Europe, but only a few arrive at their final destinations in France and Germany. Many are stuck working in the fields of Murcia, Spain. Many more drown around the waters of Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, a mere nine miles from the coasts of Morocco. This is the location where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, where Africa and Europe are the closest and at the same time the farthest away for so many people. Nieves García Benito’s stories give voice to these children, men, and women who leave their homes in Africa hoping for a better life, a safer life in Europe.

Dolors Miquel: Poems

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Issue 28, Issue 28 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By DOLORS MIQUEL
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN

Sparrowhearts

The women of my family family
hunted hunted birds, sparrows, birds, sparrows, and they made them sing
sing day in day out day in day out day in as the pots boiled, inner courtyards
wide open,
washtubs soaked old naked motheaten watery
unrinsed firstwashed clothes
and the windows opened, gave birth, opened
so beauty would regale them with songs and flowers and flowers and songs,
buzzing, zigzagging, chirping, whispering,
not understanding that they understood nothing. Nothing at all.

There’s Still Oxygen

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By CARLOTA GURT
Translated by ADRIAN NATHAN WEST

The three of you get into the car. The girls buckle their seatbelts. You turn the key. The spark plug ignites the fuel in the combustion chamber. You depart. It is only thanks to fire that you’re moving.

“Mom, how long is it gonna take?”