In the Belly of Night and Other Poems
In the Belly of Night and Other Poems
Book Cover
Irma Pineda / Translated by Wendy Call / Illustrations by Natalia Gurovich
“Irma Pineda’s poems and Wendy Call’s translations evoke tragedy, and celebrate the ways in which the human is built from dream, tradition, and nature. Self-translated as “mirror-poems” by Pineda, from Isthmus Zapotec into Spanish, and then translated into English through a complex process that is fascinatingly articulated by Call, the trilingual poems in this collection show us how translation serves as a means for cultural preservation and political resistance to the forces that seek to criminalize languages or dangerously render them extinct. In these poems, rivers have disappeared into deserts, the dead are honored and celebrated, language transforms pain into meaning, memory, and light.”
—Daniel Borzutzky, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry (USA)
Details
ISBN: 978-0-9997549-6-2
160 pages
Publication date: 2022
P/Reviews
About the Author
Irma Pineda (Binnizá, Juchitán, Oaxaca) is a poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She is the author of twelve books of bilingual (Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec) poetry. A faculty member at the National Teachers’ University, she was Vice-President of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2020 through 2022. English-language collections of her poetry, translated by Wendy Call, are co-published by Pluralia / Eulalia and forthcoming from Deep Vellum. She lives in her hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca.
About the Translator
Wendy Call (she/ella) translated In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater, both by Irma Pineda. She is author of No Word for Welcome and co-editor of the anthologies Telling True Stories (2007) and Best Literary Translations (2024). A 2015 NEA Fellow and 2018-2019 Fulbright scholar in Colombia, she lives in Seattle and Oaxaca.