Catz Fellow and Tutor Publishes a New Collection of Argentinian Poetry Translations

Professor Ben Bollig, Catz Fellow and Tutor in Spanish and Professor of Spanish American Literature, has recently published translations of the cult Argentine poet Juan Carlos Bustriazo Ortiz. The collection, which was produced in collaboration with Mark Leech, appears in the latest edition of Modern Poetry in Translation.

This special edition of MPT, titled ‘Presently Proximal Person’, is dedicated to experimental poetry. Guided by this theme of experimental translation, the featured material focuses on form, translations of the avant-garde translational transgressions and everything else that seeks new possibilities in poetry and translation.

Professor Bollig’s collaboration joins a corpus of Stéphane Bouquet, Moon Bo Young, and Ana Cristina Cesar in translation. Professor Bollig and Mark Leech first appeared in a 2019 edition of MPT, when they produced translations of Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s sonnets about insects. The collection was titled ‘Bichos’ (‘Beasties’), and more information can be found here.

The edition’s editor, Janani Ambikapathy, says it thus: “ ‘Experimental’ is not an easy word to parse—and much less in relation to translation—but it is productively ambiguous and, for my purposes here, carries with it a sense of the provisional. It is as if the poems are what you read on the page, while other forms of the same poems subsist in the abstract, in minds and dimensions off the page. I’ve come to be very fond of Elina Alter and Inna Krasnoper’s phrase ‘presently proximal person’ from their untitled poem where every verse begins with the address ‘Dear Person’. I imagine that the poems in this issue, are ‘presently proximal’ (may or may not be persons) and all the while many sense and sonic variants are being conjured by translators in the elsewhere.”

To find out more, please visit the dedicated landing page for this special edition. Many congratulations to Professor Bollig and Mark Leech!