reviews | Erica Mena

Critical vs. Criticism (And Misogyny in SF)

August 10, 2013 by Erica Mena

Not all reviews have to be critical. Of course they have to be critical, but they don’t have to criticize. And it’s too bad that so many reviewers out there seem to think that in order to demonstrate their own intelligence they have to tear apart the work they’re reviewing as much as possible. I’ve seen this over and over as a trend in reviewing – surprising because just a few years ago I remember a number of people ’round […]

Categories: Reviews • Tags: criticism, feminism, feminist, guardian books, literature, misogyny, reviews, science fiction, sexism, sf mistressworks, women

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

Subversive Poetry

January 20, 2011 by Erica Mena

So I’m not slacking in my book-a-day goal, though yes, I’m slacking on posting here. The book I finished a few days ago was Martín Espada’s The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive. It was (as I expected it would be) extraordinary. Martín is, for anyone who doesn’t know, an incredibly prolific contemporary Puerto Rican poet who writes in English and teaches at UMass Amherst. He started his professional life as a lawyer, and in the first essay […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews • Tags: Martín Espada, poetry, political poetry, Puerto Rico, reviews

Language Police on The Second Sex

February 18, 2010 by Erica Mena

It’s great to see works of literary translation carefully reviewed. (And I include philosophy, theory and creative non-fiction in my definition of literary. In fact, I define literary translation as the translation of any text that requires careful attention to style.) But ouch. Following a rather academic summary of de Beauvoir’s seminal The Second Sex, the reviewer of the new translation picks apart the translators’ work. I don’t read French at the level required to engage with de Beauvoir in […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: language police, Lawrence Venuti, reviews, Simone de Beauvoir, translation

Erica Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

Tag: reviews

Critical vs. Criticism (And Misogyny in SF)

FSG Book of 20th Century Latin American Poetry Reviewed

Subversive Poetry

Language Police on The Second Sex