The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow /
El alma se mueve en la sombra
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2023 PubWest Book Design Awards Silver Winner
2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist
2024 IBPA Book Award Silver Winner
2024 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY Awards) Bronze Winner
Translation as friendship. Translation in a fractured world. The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombraย offers dazzling imagery, original poetry, mutual translations, and collaborative essays. Swimming across borders, histories, and echoes, this groundbreaking anthology features creative partnerships that celebrate translation as equitable, intimate, and necessary.
โThis book is close to the perfect incarnation of what a nomadic poetry & poetics needs to & can be.โ โPierre Joris, author of A Nomad Poetics and Always the Many, Never the One
โbrilliant yet unruly translations, re-creations that interrogate the nature and method of translation itselfโ โKareem James Abu-Zeid, translator, editor, writer & scholar
โvisually stunningโ โIndieReader
โIt is not a book one simply reads; itโs an experience, a communion with the multifaceted soul of language.โ โIndieReader
Translation as friendship. Translation in a fractured world. Our inaugural anthologyโThe Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombraโcross-pollinates five pairs of internationally-celebrated poets and a visual artist through original poetry, mutual translation, and collaborative essays about the act of translation. The artwork offers dazzling patterns that resonate with language, suggesting cosmologies of dissolution and rebirth.
In The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra, editors Kythe Maryam Heller and Carolina Gรณmez-Montoya position English within a constellation, one point on a journey that is both cyclical and fresh. Here, translation means intimate, living relationships that expand beyond language and thatย model social practice. The result is a life-affirming language all its own.
Keywords: Asian & Asian American Studies, European Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Poetry, Poetry Anthologies, Slavic Studies, Translation, Transnational Poetry
โThis book is close to the perfect incarnation of what a nomadic poetry & poetics needs to & can be: multiple voices, multiple languages, de concert (in & out of concert/unison), exploring paths or โmirrorsโ that fork & fold, braid & dance. Which is the only way to experience (& then share as poem or art) the richly bewildering complex multiplicity of this, our world. And the only way to even approach its many-hued truths. All language is translation, and thus any/all language-constructs such as poems are always already translations. Read, reread & cross-read these โnewly-spun thread(s),โ so as โto be perpetually reborn.โโ
โPierre Joris, author of A Nomad Poetics and Always the Many, Never the One
โโWhat is unsaid in a work, in a life, migrates from one language to another,โ note the editors of this exquisite and utterly singular anthology. Itโs precisely this migration we witness as master poets alternate carrying each other across oceans and cultures into the habitats of new worlds and orthographies until this communion of voices from around the globe envelopes us in its fortifying mysteries. โTo be born is to risk,โ writes Cecilia Vicuรฑa. What these writers risk is nothing less than themselves, which is to say, everything.โ
โAskold Melnyczuk, founding editor of Arrowsmith Press
โA kind of ceaseless motion moves through all these disparate texts and voices, a restlessness, an uneasy sense of displacement. Death, loss, love, sex, exile: all the inescapable themes of great literature are here, but in new and unexpected configurations, which are then reconfigured once more through brilliant yet unruly translations, re-creations that interrogate the nature and method of translation itself.โ
โKareem James Abu-Zeid, translator, editor, writer & scholar
โA joyous, prismatic collection that playfully pushes at the boundaries of translation.โ
โJeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency
โThe Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra offers its readers an innovative countermapping of poetry and translation. Here we are blown off-course, led astray, forced to wander, by some of todayโs most relevant poetic voices in dialogue. Praise for this encounter with the liminal, for this imprecision of borders and boundaries, for this embracing of errancy.โ
โKatherine M. Hedeen, translator of poetry & Managing Editor of Action Books
โThe Soul Conveys Itself In Shadowย (El alma se mueve en la sombra) is an anthology with a powerful and raw expression of poetic identity. Its pattern is kaleidoscopic, woven with vibrant threads of diverse voices, delving into themes of love, loss, and liberation. It is not a book one simply reads; itโs an experience, a communion with the multifaceted soul of language. The translations, while literal in their approach, effectively capture the original voices of the authors. Additionally, the artwork is intricately detailed and visually stunning.โ
โIndieReader
โIn this perfect anthology, Kythe Heller and Carolina Gรณmez-Montoya invite you to hope along with them that the โreciprocity of care in approaching languages and each otherโ will become a social practice. Here, the task of translation is to reveal not only an exchange of language as it morphs into renditions of meaning, but also to dissolves any artificial boundaries between one body being a poet, and the other being a translator. Here, there are no discreet beings; rather, each is an emerging and hierarchyless montage of thoughtful presences encountering each other within the field of the poem. The poet is the translator and the translator is the poet, and in this bodylessness, language as a โliving presenceโ unfolds with exquisite intensity within form, story, concept, history, trauma, eros, resistance, and everything else that is moving. The astonishing paintings of Kit Warren are woven within the pages, conveying the cellular and atomic field into which these morphings are โpractices of errancy across language & consciousness.โ This book is a rare gift into which translation, as poettranslator AlcalรกVicuรฑa write, โperhaps the truest translation of the flower is yet to come.โโ
โK (Kristin) Prevallet, interdisciplinary conceptual poet & author of Everywhere Here and In Brooklyn
โThe Soul Conveys Itself in Shadowย reminds us that translation can be a tool for thinking, for remembering, for โconsoling usโ. Full of curiosity and โexpansivenessโ, the works collected in this anthology breathe the myriad ways we can commit to a poem, and make it โpalpableโ. Translation, here, is such a โbreathable fabricโ, is hooks, is curves, is dotted lines, a rug we curl up on, a kitchen table we gather around. These texts across languages, across memories, across borders, are โsoakedโ, โladenโ โleveledโ, โslipperyโ, they mark what or whoโs been silenced, drawing us in. Kit Warrenโs drawings further translate the page, making it vibrate with attention, they hook us, circling around a pattern, a shape, in varying degrees of thickness or emphasis. I follow these lines. Like translation, like all making that traces another voice, another idea, another material, these lines sometimes cross over, sometimes they lift into the air, or constrict, draw borders, form edges. Sometimes shapes peek out from in between the fold of the page, are barely visible, and we sense that the real work lies inside the gap, the โgutterโ, which we canโt grasp. Translation is this dot inside a little cube, a leaky brittle body, a fruit peel, with its layers, it adds flourishes and swirls. Ultimately, itโs in the ornamentations, the annotations, that we get to know the matter somethingโs made of, how it holds together. Little โscraps of weaving garbageโ, I gather these works in my hands, to care for them.โ
โSophie Seita, multi-disciplinary artist, writer & researcher
โAfter reading this collection of translated poems, the word that emerged almost materially in my mind is buckle, a tool to fasten two ends together into one. A belt around the body, which is a body of a book and the bodies of all of these authors and translators. Some of the pairs translate one another in an exchange, some engage in conversations that elucidate their processes and their thinking about the crossings inherent in these translations. There is a coming together and a coming apart. A buckle is a temporary instrument, and it is designed to come undone.โ
โJD Pluecker, translator & editor
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