Translating Indigenous, Bicultural Poetry from Guatemala and Mexico, Part 2 (in Spanish)

The resulting translations are deep collaborations between the bicultural (and often bilingual) poets, and their translators, who read/speak only Spanish, and not the Indigenous language. In Part 2 of this 2-part session, poet Rosa Chávez (Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel, Guatemala), and her translator converse with Irma Pineda about writing and translating poetry on eroticism, queerness, motherhood, matrilineal knowledge transmission, ritual, and systemic violence.

…

Moderator

Wendy Call is Associate Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University and a recent Fulbright Scholar in Colombia. She is author of No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (2011) and translator of Irma Pineda’s In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (2020).

Presenters

Rosa Chávez is a Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel poet, playwright, artist, and activist who is Guatemala Program Coordinator for the international feminist organization JASS Mesoamerica. She is the author of five books of poetry, including Quitapenas (2010), and the play AWAS (2014). Her poetry has been widely anthologized and translated. Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez is a Guatemalan American poet, translator, and Literature PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz. Her work appears in The Wandering Song: Central Americans Writing in the United States (2017) and Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands(2016). She attended the Kenyon Review Translators Workshop with a scholarship. Irma Pineda has published nine bilingual (Diidxazá-Spanish) books of poetry. Naxiña Rului’ Ladze’ / Rojo Deseo (2018) won Mexico’s Caballo Verde Prize for best poetry book. She is a professor of intercultural education, advisor in the Mexican Congress, and Vice President of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.