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In a summer poetry seminar I attended, I inadvertently found out that one of rooms in the poetry cottages is haunted when I was having lunch with peer poets. One poet joked that the ghost might touch the occupants tenderly at night.\u00a0 I have only seen the exterior of the poetry cottage while my peers and I said farewell to visiting poets, but have never been inside. When I go back to visit, I will try to search for the ghost in that room in the cottage, and be thrilled to encounter the apparition. I know you are probably less weird, but if you are still curious about how ghosts interact with humans, you might find the answer in Galo Ghigliotto\u2019s\u00a0Valdivia<\/em>\u00a0translated by Daniel Borzutzky.<\/p>\n Valdviva<\/em> is set in Pincochet\u2019s reign in Chile and focuses on the violence inflicted on Chilean citizens. In Borzutzky\u2019s translation of these poems, readers can hear the dead\u2019s voices to the living. Although their words are filled with the trauma and horror they endured, tenderness and intimacy with their beloved family and friends surface between the lines.\u00a0 In Ghigliotto\u2019s poems, the dead are not sad spirits that lament their fate. Instead, they celebrate their past, and they connect with the living in dreams.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Imagine that a huge frog sits next to you on a train. How will you react? Will you politely ask Mr. Frog to show you his snacks of dead insects? Probably not. I will give him a friendly smile and scream secretly in my heart. If you have ever traveled to a foreign country and board a train, you\u2019ll probably stand out like a frog and find others gawking at you like a misfit and a weird creature. When you arrive in that new country, you will assimilate, and be less of a weirdo. You probably want to ask yourself, \u201cWho am I and where do I belong?\u201d If you are curious about how to approach this big question, come to hear Hedeen\u2019s translation of \u201cThe Night Badly Written\u201d by V\u00edctor Rodr\u00edguez N\u00fa\u00f1ez.<\/p>\n Nunez\u2019s The Night Badly Written <\/em>explores transnational consciousness, and challenges the concept of border. In Hedeen\u2019s translations of these poems, the traveler meditates his relationship with strangers in their native land and questions what messages they conveyed to him through imagery of natural landscape. The speakers in Nunez\u2019s poems found themselves alienated from the land that they were previously intimate with and their identity destabilize in reconciliation of multiple cultures they encounter.<\/p>\n Here are the bios of these two cool translators:<\/p>\n Daniel Borzutzky is the author of\u00a0The Performance of Becoming Human<\/em>, recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include\u00a0In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy<\/em>\u00a0(Nightboat, 2015),\u00a0Memories of my Overdevelopment<\/em>\u00a0(Kenning Editions, 2015); and\u00a0The Book of Interfering Bodies<\/em>\u00a0(Nightboat, 2011). He has translated poetry collections from Spanish, including Galo Ghigliotto\u2019s\u00a0Valdivia<\/em>\u00a0(Coimpress, 2016); Ra\u00fal Zurita\u2019s\u00a0The Country of Planks<\/em>\u00a0(Action Books, 2015) and\u00a0Song for his Disappeared Love<\/em>\u00a0(Action Books, 2010); and Jaime Luis Huen\u00fan\u2019s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). He lives in Chicago.<\/p>\n Katherine Hedeen is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. She is the poetry translation editor for\u00a0The Kenyon Review,<\/em>\u00a0an editor at Cubanabooks, co-editor of Arc Publications Latin American Poetry in Translation Series, and an associate editor of Earthwork\u2019s Latin American Poetry. Among her latest publications are\u00a0tasks<\/em>\u00a0(co im press, 2016), a recent poetry collection by V\u00edctor Rodr\u00edguez N\u00fa\u00f1ez and\u00a0the night badly written<\/em>\u00a0(action books, 2017), an anthology of Rodr\u00edguez N\u00fa\u00f1ez\u2019s latest work. Other book-length translations include collections by Rodolfo Alfonso, Juan Ba\u00f1uelos, Juan Calzadilla, Marco Antonio Campos, Luis Garc\u00eda Montero, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jam\u00eds, Hugo Mujica, Jos\u00e9 Emilio Pacheco, and Ida Vitale.<\/p>\n Daniel Borzutzky and Katherine Hedeen will read on September 20, 2017 in the Hammes Campus Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. Come and bring your friends1<\/p>\n – Lavinia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a summer poetry seminar I attended, I inadvertently found out that one of rooms in the poetry cottages is haunted when I was having lunch with peer poets. One poet joked that the ghost might touch the occupants tenderly at night.\u00a0 I have only seen the exterior of the poetry cottage while my peers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":478,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5065,25392],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-readings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/478"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/mfa-creative-writing\/files\/2017\/09\/frog-1120503_960_720.jpg\")
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