action books, 2021
prepoems in postspanish and other poems marks the first full-length collection to appear in English by the groundbreaking Ecuadorian poet Jorgenrique Adoum (1926-2009), hailed by Nobel-prize winner Pablo Neruda as the best Latin American poet of his generation. Adoum’s poetry is at once radically experimental, fiercely lyrical, and passionately committed to social change. This timely volume showcases Adoum at his most formally innovative, gathering together three books published between 1973 and 1993: Curriculum Mortis, prepoems in postspanish, and Love Disinterred. Translators Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s inventive and expert renderings bring Adoum’s experimentation to the fore.
Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez translate Adoum’s postspanish, but they also break a different group of rules in English. It is what makes prepoems one of the most impressive translations that I’ve ever read—and I don’t say this lightly. Theirs is precisely the kind of translation that emerging and established translators, especially of writing from the Global South, should read, re-read, and re-read again. Where Adoum unsettles the limits of Spanish, opening it up to “prepossibilities” and “postpossibilities,” Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez’s “postenglish” compels us to ask why English is the way it is, which—as Adoum teaches us—is also to ask: Why are things the way they are? What other sides exist?
—Olivia Lott, Words Without Borders
Adoum’s poems, constantly straining against the bounds of discourse, present a ripe opportunity for the rethinking of language. In the moments when his speaker’s voice morphs from the impersonality of a newsreel or medical report to a stripped-down longing for a more human existence, one can sense how language is always one step removed from intent.
—Justin Sun, Heavy Feather Review
The best Latin American poet of his generation.
—Pablo Neruda
For the rest of my life, I will be grateful to these translators! Jorgenrique Adoum has an extraordinary landscape for us to meet, explore “in the subsoul or the dislife” and to know poets, poetry, as new all over again. The strength of poetry has never been more evident!
—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
These electric poems burn and mourn, seduce and jeer. They bend language and lore; they strain against state repression. They painstakingly document the “cottony calm” and the turtle’s “historical sadness,” in a translation that attends expertly to the poems’ ecstatic coinages and revolutionary energy. It’s an awesome book.
—Natalie Shapero, author of Hard Child
poems on Poesía en Acción
poems at Poetry Daily
poems in Seedings