By YC
The bilingual anthology Equívocos / Misconceptions. Cuban poets from the beginning of the 21st century, published in 2021 by the Department of Languages, Philosophy, Religion and Cultures of Rockford University, brings together twenty-one authors who break with traditional generational classifications . These poets are children of misunderstanding: either they have published their first collection of poems in full adulthood (like Magali Alabau and Aleisa Ribalta Guzmán), or they have left Cuba early without being able to develop a poetic work within the island (like om ulloa and Kelly Martínez- Grandal), or move between two promotions (such as Jorge Luis Arcos and Norge Espinosa), or belong to the last years of total dispersion (such as Legna Rodríguez Iglesias and Jamila Medina Ríos)… Considerations on their individual poetics appear in the brief introductions that head the selection of poems of each one of them. The edition and the selection have been in charge of Yoandy Cabrera and the English translations have been made by Rockford University students, together with university professors and professional translators.
The fall of the field socialist, the decentralization and crisis of the national, the continuous increase in Cuban emigration to any point on the planet and communications through the Internet are some of the references that the editor uses to talk about the chaotic opening of change and the beginning of the century represented in the various poetics of the anthologized. Among them are both more visible figures and others less known and even unpublished within the Cuban literary panorama.
Several of these poets demand with their works to reconsider what are today the margins, the inside and the outside in Cuban poetry, because more and more, and due to technology and the increase in trips to and from Cuba, the poetry of the diaspora is (con)fused with that written on the island, which it causes the traditional exegetical categories and boundaries to continually blur and shift. If Néstor Díaz de Villegas, for example, embodies the plurality and diversity without meridian of the last four decades of Cuban poetry, Dolan Mor, for his part, makes up for the generational absence of the beginning of the 21st century, while at the same time reaffirming that generational impossibility. His entire poetics (with multiple pseudonyms and annulments of the self) could be considered the generation that we are missing, while the almost total absence of any Cuban reference in his work makes us think of the denial of that same (im)possible generation. .
Some of the fundamental themes that this anthology presents as part of the most recent poetic concerns of Cuban authors are: dispersion and exodus, the search for one’s own space after of expulsion or abandonment, in addition to the continuous interaction of the classic, Christian and Afro-Cuban myth with the insular reality. Also important is the use of the double as part of the migratory trauma, the insistence on the impulsive and the unknown daimonic, the questioning of traditional forms of Cubanness, the most varied religious sentiment, but also the transgression of space and ecclesiastical symbols, the interest in Asian cultures, the relationship between translation and poetry, as well as the mixture of various registers and tones. Eros in all its diversity, the relationship between existentialism and corporeality, the interest in the variety of flows and hollows of the female body, the relationship between poetry and theater, the review of island history, the questioning of the archi- heroism, in addition to the feminization of certain epic and patriarchal traditions. The relationship between science/technology and language, between botany and poetry, the mixture of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the dissident frontality before the Cuban regime, the revisitation (including parody) of the work of other authors of the universal canon and the island (such as José Martí, Julián del Casal, Lorenzo García Vega, Virgilio Piñera and Dulce María Loynaz), the new inhabited territories (Miami, Zaragoza, Sweden…), as well as life in the Cuban urban and rural environment.
This anthology is born from the very heart of the classroom, from a pedagogical exercise. The translations are a direct result of the anthologist’s Spring 2020 Advanced Translation course at Rockford University. The selection pursues two main objectives: (1) that readers become familiar with some of the most important poetic voices on the Cuban scene so far in the 21st century, and (2) that they be useful and appropriate texts at the level of a class of advanced translation for university students. That pedagogical sense that gives life to this project is also a main objective of the anthology.
Available at:
Link to the anthology on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/ Equ%C3%ADvocos-Misconceptions-Century-Bilingual-Anthology/dp/B09M552P6W
Link de the anthology on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ebdQEAAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
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