TRANSFERRING U.S. LATINO POETS INTO THE SPANISHSPEAKING WORLD

Translation is slippery art that compounds the problems of the inherent instability of language with the unruly process of duplicating it in another system. The sliding that occurs in the translation of multicultural poetry is even more pronounced since the distance from “the norm” becomes greater and greater. This is true firstly because poetry is a genre that strives for verbal concision and innovation in a playful defiance of norms that pique the reader’s imagination; and secondly because the multilingual poet often involves a second language —either in its original form or as a translation into the language of composition—to enhance sound and cultural imagery. Latino poetry generally glides along on the linguistic and cultural tension inherent in both its poeticity and its English/Spanish and Latino/Anglo dualities that challenge normative discourse. Therefore, the translation of this verse must also produce for the reader a similarly slippery tension, a task that Fabián Iriarte and I constantly grappled with in the editing of a recent bilingual anthology, Usos de la imaginación: poesía de l@s latin@s en EE.UU