In Translation

With Good Reason

In the '80s and '90s, many Puerto Rican poets who lived in the contiguous United States wrote within a fixed aya and aca/mainland vs. island story. The island was home. Jane Alberdeston Coralin and other contemporary Puerto Rican poets approach their selves, memories and bodies as home. And: Latin American literature of the 60’s was complex and required active readers. By the 70s and 80s, the literature had conformed to the demands of the marketplace: it was localist, exotic and saturated with magical realism. Tomás Regalado-López says that the 1996 Crack Movement transformed the marketplace for Latin American writers. It shifted things from a narrow stereotype to a land of endless possibilities. Plus: In the 1950s, a Californian poet named Jack Spicer did something wonky. He wrote the introduction to his book in the voice of long deceased poet Federico Garcia Lorca. And he took liberty to translate Lorca’s work as he wished. Scott Challener says that this inspired a generation of poets to approach translation as correspondence.