Jorge Carrigan
A businessman, prosperous and ambitious, determines that it’s time to get married and establish a family at the very moment that a businesswoman, firm and resolute, who has just founded her own company, decides that it’s time to enter into a marriage agreement.
Martin Boyd
I recently had a discussion with another translator about the use of the English word “alien”. Those of us who grew up subjected to the cinematic expression of Ridley Scott’s terrifying imagination would probably be surprised to know that most English dictionaries do not list “a creature from another planet” as the first definition of the word “alien”. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, gives the following as the first definition of the noun form: “a foreigner, especially one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living”. The extraterrestrial definition of the noun comes second. Three definitions are provided for the adjective form: (1) “belonging to a foreign country”, (2) “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and, finally, (3) “supposedly from another world”. In any case, whatever the recognized uses of the word “alien” may be, I would argue that for most English speakers it invariably conjures up images of frightening lizard creatures or terrorizing mutants, and that it is therefore no longer appropriate to use the term in reference to fellow human beings.
Paulina Derbez
In 2005, my husband and I took the decision to move from Mexico City to Toronto, Canada. The motivation behind our move was both professional and personal, as my husband had lived a part of his childhood in Toronto, and I had previously had the opportunity to perform in one of Toronto’s major festivals. It was not an easy decision to make, but I personally felt a strong impulse to make a big change. And indeed, it was a big change; much bigger than we had expected.
At Peace
Amado Ruiz de Nervo y Ordaz is, without doubt, one of the most outstanding poets of the Mexican literary canon. Born in Tepic, Nayarit in 1870, he moved to Mexico City in 1894, where he soon became a prominent journalist and published his first works. In 1900 he travelled to Paris, and later worked for the Mexican government as a diplomat in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. A consummate novelist and essayist, Nervo is nevertheless best remembered for his poetry, whose delicate combination of mysticism and melancholy makes him perhaps one of the most emblematic ambassadors of the Mexican soul.
The Whirling of the Serpent: Quetzalcoatl Resurrected
Author: José Luis Díaz
Translated by Martin Boyd
Publisher: Antares
Toronto, 2009
Review by Tania Hernández Cervantes
If you want to understand the origins of a nation, look at the myths that give it life. Myths, like symbols, the ideological, utopian dreams of individuals and of peoples, describe us. If it were not so, national flags would have no meaning. Quetzalcoatl is one of those myths which, in spite of the rationalism of the modern era, survive in Mexico’s collective imagination. Quetzalcoatl is the bird with green, white and red feathers. It is the Mesoamerican myth of the dual god, bird and serpent. The Mexican flag bears its colours, and in the centre is an image of an eagle devouring a serpent, an indisputable allusion to Quetzalcoatl.
Martin Boyd
In Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), John Felstiner’s self-reflective study of his approach to translating Pablo Neruda’s classic work Alturas de Macchu Picchu, the translator describes verse translation as “an essential act and art of literary criticism” (Felstiner 2). Since Felstiner wrote these words, the concept of translator as literary critic has become something of a recurring theme in translation theory, although few have developed the concept as fully as B. Folkart Di Stefano did in his article “Translation as Literary Criticism”, published in 1982. Just as Di Stefano argues that a translator must “bring the full apparatus of literary criticism to bear on the text before and while rendering it” (Di Stefano 254), Felstiner presents a solid argument that the process of translating a poem requires the translator “to find, by scholarly and analytic means, how the poet came to write this work” (37). Felstiner presents this task, as daunting as it sounds, as a journey deep into the world of the source text and its author, driven by a desire to truly understand them both: “I wanted some hold on what Pablo Neruda stood for. I could get that by taking his poem on its own terms and then translating it into my own” (10).
Behold your back
Omar Alberto Santos Balán is a Mexican poet and short story writer based in Campeche. Awards he has received for his work include the “Ignacio Manuel Altamirano” National Prize in December 2006, the Bonaventuriano Poetry and Short Story Prize in Colombia in 2008, and the Edmundo Valadés Latin American Short Story Prize in 2008. He has published 3 collections of his poetry, and his work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. For more information and to see more of his work (in the original Spanish), visit the website “Poetas del Mundo“.
To Roosevelt
Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, often cited as one of the most important precursors of 20th century Latin American literature, wrote this poem in 1905. An open letter to the U.S. president of the time, the poem is almost prophetic in its description of the interventionist approach that successive U.S. governments would take in Latin America in the century that followed, and also presents a mythologized portrait of Latin America that would inform the ideology of many of the continent’s anti-imperialist revolutions. In many respects, the poem is as relevant today in its presentation of U.S.-Latin American relations as it was when it was written 105 years ago.
A Friendly Invitation
Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938): poet, professor, journalist and one of the most representative figures of the Latin American post-modernist movement. Born in Lugano (the Italian part of Switzerland) to Argentine parents, she grew up mostly in Rosario, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires at the age of 19. She published her first collection of poems, La Inquietud del Rosal in 1916, and by the 1920s she had become one of Argentina’s most prominent poets, renowned for her amorous and often erotic verse. A recurring theme of her poetry is male oppression of women, for which she would later become an icon for the feminist movement throughout Latin America. In 1937, on learning that she had breast cancer, Storni drowned herself in the sea off Mar del Plata. Her often romanticized death was immortalized in the song “Alfonsina y el Mar”, which has been recorded by Mercedes Sosa and Nana Mouskouri, among others.
Martin Boyd
Canada is often applauded as the first country in the world to adopt “multiculturalism” as a political imperative. As early as the 1970s, the concept of a multicultural nation was central to Pierre Trudeau’s vision of the “Just Society”. Yet most of the Trudeau government’s concrete achievements to foster multiculturalism stopped short at protecting the rights of Canada’s French-speaking minority, and, thirty years later, Canada still seems to be struggling to expand its national identity beyond the narrow scope of English-French bilingualism to become truly multicultural. The most obvious example of Canada’s myopic vision of multiculturalism lies in the Canadian tendency to assume “bilingual education” means instruction in English and French, as if these were the only two languages that exist in the country. Indeed, while the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms includes two clauses under the misleading heading “Minority Language Educational Rights”, the clauses themselves speak only of the rights to receive an education in Canada’s two official languages, with no rights accorded to the millions of speakers of Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, Polish, Korean, Ukrainian, Hindi, Portuguese or Spanish who have made Canada their home – or, for that matter, speakers of Canada’s many indigenous languages.