Mónica de la Torre Audibly Discusses Repetition Nineteen and Translating Concrete Poetry for Relaunch of Beloved Circumference

Mónica de la Torre talks with Montana Ray for Circumference's podcast about her new book, Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020). Additional topics include "self-translation across time, space and language, [and] translating as a means to establish poetic lineages." Yes, please.

De la Torre also discusses her recent translations of concrete poetry by Lenora de Barros and Amanda Berenguer. She's co-edited, with Alex Balgiu, the just-published Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (Primary Information, 2020), which "features expansive, serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility [and] includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax" as a kind of feminist practice. In the Circumference episode, she also reads from her translations of the enigmatic Chilean poet Omar Cáceres, and from her own work.  

Other poetry content in the new issue includes four poems from Osip Mandelstam's The Voronezh Notebooks, translated by Matvei Yankelevich and John High (birds tell us the pair recently won an NEH grant for these translations, so this is exciting to see).

Much more can be previewed at Circumference, and listen to De la Torre and Ray's episode here. And if you're in the Zoom area, looks like the journal's relaunch event is happening tonight, thanks to McNally Jackson, featuring readings from a good handful of these contributors. See you at 5pm EST!