From Christodoulos Makris - I'm pleased to announce publication of Centrifugal, a bilingual anthology of reciprocal translations / re-interpretations / versions of the work of 7 pairs of contemporary poets from the cities of Dublin and Guadalajara. Co-edited by Ángel Ortuño (Guadalajara) and myself (Dublin), the book is published as part of a series of city-to-city collaborative projects by Mexico's EBL-Cielo Abierto publishing house, in conjunction with Conaculta, Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts.
Last Monday 1 December, Ángel Ortuño, EBL-Cielo Abierto editorial director Rocío Cerón, and I launched Centrifugal at the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico. The Guadalajara Book Fair is the premier annual meeting event of the Spanish-language publishing world, with over 750,000 visitors.
About Centrifugal: 7 poets from Dublin and 7 from Guadalajara exchange selections of their work in pairs and render the work of their partner poet in the opposite language. The emphasis is on re-interpretation rather than traditional translation: the poems become new in the hands of the partner poet while bearing the poetic core of the original.
Centrifugal investigates the multiple possibilities of meaning released through the transfer of texts between languages. The poets' responses range from rewrites to deliberate mistranslations to dialogues with the originals to entirely new poems. Some make use of a near native-level knowledge of the opposite language, and some require literal translations of the source texts; others resort to dictionaries, web searches or Google Translate.
The writing presented in Centrifugal "strays from the centre, away from the main stream of how poetry and translation are expected to behave". In addition to providing a record of the work of some of the outstanding poets currently writing in the two cities, this book stands as a significant contribution to the exploration of the relationships between language, geography, identity and poetry.
Featuring:
Alan Jude Moore & Xitlálitil Rodríguez
Anamaría Crowe Serrano & Mónica Nepote
Catherine Walsh & Laura Solórzano
Christodoulos Makris & Luis Eduardo García
John Kearns & José Eugenio Sánchez
Kimberly Campanello & Ángel Ortuño
Kit Fryatt & Ricardo Castillo
For more information, review copies etc please email akismakris71@yahoo.com.