Erica Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

Main menu

Skip to content

Visual Art
Literary Art
- poetry
- translations
Teaching
Freelance
- editing
- design
About
- contact
- blog

Tag: Latin America

Show Grid Show List

Post navigation

The History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo (ed. David Carrasco)

August 18, 2013 by Erica Mena

I just finished the 376 page abridgment of Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s “true” History of the Conquest of New Spain selected, edited and translated by David Carrasco. I stumbled across this book in a reference, an extended quote, from another book I was reading on the history of the feather (Feathers by Thor Hanson). A vivid description of the splendor of the aviaries in Tenochitlan, and their subsequent targeted destruction by burning by Cortés. Though I didn’t find either of […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: bernal diaz del castillo, history, Latin America, mexico, reading journal

1

FSG Book of 20th Century Latin American Poetry Reviewed

June 10, 2011 by Erica Mena

The work of an anthologist is violent, like that of a translator, dismembering a whole cultural context and transporting limbs of it to a new environment. And like translation, the result can always be termed as loss—a loss of wholeness (i. e. context), a loss of embodiment in time and place (i. e. culture). The pieces become relics, deadened in a museum of pages instead of alive in their usefulness. The act of collecting them, framing them and presenting them, […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: anthology, Ilan Stavens, Latin America, poetry, review, reviews, translation, twentieth century