Erica Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

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Tag: translation

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Los Surcos del Azar

March 9, 2017 by Erica Mena

One of my very favorite things about translating is how hard it is. As any five translators to work on the same sentence and you’ll get five different results, all of them perfectly legitimate and yet none the same. There are a ton of great translation theorists who talk about this (many of whom I’ve been teaching this semester in the phenomenal translation theory class I’m doing with the Low Residency MFA in Literary Translation at Mills College!), but that […]

Categories: Translation • Tags: antonio machado, erica mena, literary translation, poetry, poetry translation, translation

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Canyon in the Body by Lan Lan translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

February 9, 2015 by Erica Mena

In many ways this book is exactly what I expected. It is a collection of beautiful, light, lyric poems, in a very traditional translation that is beautiful, light, lyric and focused on image and meaning and very occasionally sound. If this appeals to you, you will love this book. For me, though, there wasn’t much beyond a few occasional moments that really grabbed me about it. Lan Lan is clearly a finely attenuated poet, one who puts great care into the […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews • Tags: canyon in the body, chines poetry, contemporary poetry, fiona sze-lorrain, lan lan, literary translation, poetry, translation, zephyr press

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Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert

January 10, 2015 by Erica Mena

After reading Diana’s Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, in Yvette Siegert’s translation, all the way through in one sitting, I wanted immediately to read it again. It’s a slim volume of equally slim poems, but they’re the kind of sparing that is deceptive. I hadn’t read much Pizarnik before, I’d seen her pop up in anthologies and translation workshops, I can’t tell you how many emerging translators I know who’ve started with her work. But, I think mostly because of estate issues and […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews, Translation • Tags: alejandra pizarnik, diana's tree, literary translation, poetry, translation, ugly duckling, yvette siegert

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What's in a name? If it's The Eternonaut, it's a lot.

November 7, 2014 by Erica Mena

The graphic novel I translated a few years ago is in production, and coming out with Fantagraphics (swoon) next year. It’s an amazing work by the phenomenal Argentine author Héctor Germán Oesterheld, illustrated by the incredible Francisco Solano López. I’m so excited to see it brought out in English, I can barely contain myself. And for the most part, I’ve received some really great feedback on the translation and my advocacy for the work. But there’s this thing that has come up […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: el eternauta, francisco solano lopez, graphic novel, hector german oesterheld, literary translation, the eternonaut, translation

5

Translation is a Compromised Body

October 23, 2014 by Erica Mena

Some smartening of some stuff I said about translation and poetry and compromised bodies at a poetry-gathering last week in LA made its way onto the Poetry Foundation blog. Amanda says these things way smarter than I think I did, though. “Here is what Erica Mena (of Anomalous) discussed in response to these questions (of course, this is just a summary, and many parts are missing): She wanted to contest the idea of translation as a the idea of equivalence—one […]

Categories: Poetry, Translation • Tags: experimental poetry, experimental translation, poetry, translation

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CFP: Queering Translation – Translating the Queer

March 3, 2014 by Erica Mena

Oh boy does this sound great! Call for papers: Queering Translation – Translating the Queer Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna 26-28 March 2015 Aim and Theme of the Conference: Since de Lauretis introduced queer theory as „another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual“ (1991:iv), this approach has played an important role in the analysis of sex and gender in Literary, Film and Cultural Studies. Despite its claim of interdisciplinarity, Translation Studies has yet to fully integrate […]

Categories: Call for Papers, Translation • Tags: conference, queer, queer literature, translation, world literature

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Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schlanasky, trans. Christine Lo

June 15, 2013 by Erica Mena

This book caught my eye a few years ago in the Harvard Bookstore. I wasn’t at the time acquiring books, since we’d been moving so much, so I wrote down the title in Evernote on my phone and promptly forgot about it. This spring, as I was trying to clean out some stuff from my phone hoping to squeeze another few months of life out of it, I came across the note and remembered being intrigued by the subtitle: Fifty […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: atlas of remote islands, book arts, cartography, christine lo, judith schlanasky, translation

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Notes on Conceptualisms by Richard Fitterman and Vanessa Place

May 11, 2013 by Erica Mena

Was considering assigning this for The Art of Stealing, but though there are moments that are very interesting, as a whole the book fell short of my hopes. The Fitterman section seemed a little too enamored of its own brilliance, as evidenced by the reliance on fairly obtuse language and a lot of the kind of name-dropping reference that is fine for notational purposes but I think is really a kind of self-satisfied flouting of ones’ own library. Though I […]

Categories: Reading Journal, Teaching • Tags: art of stealing, conceptual writing, manifesto, notes on conceptualisms, richard fitterman, translation

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Fortino Sámano by Virginie Lalucq

April 25, 2013 by Erica Mena

This complicated little book is actually two in one – a poem and an “overflowing” of the poem, a poem and its poetic exegesis. The first section is an ekphrastic poem written by Virginie Laluq and translated by Sylvain Gallais, written in response to a photograph of the Mexican guerilla and counterfeiter moments before his execution by firing squad. I have not seen this photograph (in fact, when I googled it while writing this, the page refused to respond, and asked me several […]

Categories: Reading Journal, Translation • Tags: art, cynthia hogue, ekphrasis, fortino samano, jean-lug nancy, philosophy, poetry, sylvain gallais, translation, virginie lalucq

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Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

April 1, 2013 by Erica Mena

I don’t read very much fiction nowadays, or at least not very much ‘literary’ fiction, that is, unless I’m translating it. It’s the sad reality of being an overstretched graduate student that I’ve had to narrow my reading down to poetry, contemporary poetry, contemporary innovative poetry, contemporary primarily women’s innovative poetry and even then I have a stack of books I’m unlikely to get through in the next year. Well, sad and exhilarating. But when the advance proof for Mundo Cruel […]

Categories: Reading Journal, Translation • Tags: fiction, luis negron, mundo cruel, puerto rican literature, Puerto Rico, reading journal, seven stories, short stories, suzanne jill levine, translation

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