The WInter Garden Photograph / La foto del invernadero, by Reina María Rodríguez
Int. & tr. Kristin Dykstra (principal translator)
Includes a set of co-translations with Nancy Gates Madsen
& an interview by Rosa Alcalá
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019
Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Finalist for the 2020 National Translation Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award
“In jagged, fresh-cut, emotive rhythms, and in a lexicon sourced from science, domestic relations, and literature, Reina María Rodríguez creates a poetry of attentiveness so immediate that no sooner does it express itself, than it is subject to revision and qualification. Through the sensuality of her diction and the abruptive but musical pulse of her syntax, Rodríguez takes up the Wittgensteinian directive to look and see a world that, as the poet puts it, ‘fits into the eyes of the cat.’ The Winter Garden Photograph is as much discursive meditation on memory as it is a riveting embodiment of insight and intuition, and a declaration of love for the great surprising variety of the world. Almost impossibly, the translators negotiate the definitive peculiarities of Rodríguez’s unique phrasing with inspired English versions that neither normalize, dumb-down, nor exoticize the magic of the originals.” –From the PEN judges’ citation
“Reina María Rodríguez is the premier poet of her generation and one of Cuba's most dynamic leading thinkers.” –Roberto Tejada
Link to Poetry Society of America feature
Materia Prima, Anthology of Poetry by Amanda Berenguer
Ed. & int. Kristin Dykstra & Kent Johnson
Tr. Gillian Brassil, Anna Deeny Morales, Kristin Dykstra, Kent Johnson, Urayoán Noel, Jeannine Marie Pitas, Mónica de la Torre, and Alex Verdolini
Preface by Roberto Echavarren
Interview with Amanda Berenguer by Silvia Guerra, tr. Jeannine Pitas
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019
“Amanda Berenguer, a major voice of the Uruguayan group of artists & thinkers known as the Generation of ’45, is finally getting her due in anglophone territory with the fine translations of this well-edited collection. Hers is urgent work, ‘wingenious’ and ‘mythovulsive,’ feisty yet lyrical, playful yet deeply serious, explorative yet assured. A great achievement.” —Pierre Joris
" I climb into Amanda Berenguer's pages and soar among cats, Möbius strips, quinces, blackbirds, The Magellanic Clouds." —Ewa Chrusciel
The first anthology with English translation dedicated to the poetry of Amanda Berenguer. Finalist for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award.
Link to Poetry Society of America feature
"Every collection should shoot this high." -- Garrett Phelps, Asymptote
Cubanology
A Book of Days by Omar Pérez
Tr. & afterword, Kristin Dykstra
Station Hill Press, 2018
"Welcoming as the guenmai soup whose making recurs throughout this journal, Cubanology carries the flavors of zen intensives, languages, and housecleaning; Greek retsina and Dutch beer; murmured conversations with books, friends, strangers, cultures, countries, and conditions. Omar Pérez is equally home-leaver and home-maker wherever he travels. Language is his pillow; zazen his backpack; music and imagination's freedoms his left and right shoes."—Jane Hirshfield
"A Book of Days for the new century, a clear-eyed account of his travels in Europe, in the form of journal entries, essays, poems, translations, and meditations. [...It] reveals the heart and soul of one of the most important artists of our time." —Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood
"On the one hand, Cubanology makes readers wonder about an undercurrent to the eclectic everyday coincidences as well as the spiritual practices and ideologies that inform them, frequently evoked through silences, but on the other hand, the book urges our yielding to the present, without needing to know beforehand where the book will end up, or how the past hinges upon the present." --Jacqueline Loss, Review: Literature and the Arts 52
The World as Presence / El mundo como ser
Poetry by Marcelo Morales
Tr. & int. Kristin Dykstra
The University of Alabama Press, 2016
Longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry
“Through Kristin Dykstra’s superb translation of The World as Presence / El mundo como ser, we see Marcelo Morales’s never-ending need to articulate, to question, and to be awed by what is important to him as intellectual, as citizen, as family member, and poet. While his concerns are often political, philosophical, and global, they are at the same time intricately and inseparably bound to the body and the personal life of the poet. Morales directly interrogates (in a context that does not encourage or support directness) both the Cuban past and present, and through his work we find reference to a number of important markers of Cuban history and culture. An unforgettable presence for the unforgettable tenseness of the present.”—Daniel Borzutzky
The first full-length book by Morales to be translated into English.
Counterpunch (And Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales)
Poetry by Juan Carlos Flores
Tr. & int. Kristin Dykstra
The University of Alabama Press, 2016
“Kristin Dykstra’s translation of Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores’s El Contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) breathes interpretive and musical life into the exciting syncopated prose poetry written by an author whose voice is genuinely distinctive among that island’s post-revolutionary generation. As well, Dykstra’s work is a solid scholarly contribution. It features rigorous translator’s notes and an essay that frames the work in its social circumstances and historical moment.” –Roberto Tejada
The first full-length book by Flores to be translated into English.
"The Counterpunch gives voice (and image) to a truly innovative series of prose poems that are brilliantly crafted snapshots of everyday life and culture in Alamar." -- Scott Weintraub, Chicago Review
Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza
Poetry by Ángel Escobar
Tr. & int. Kristin Dykstra
The University of Alabama Press, 2016
"Breach of Trust is a book of poetry by one of the most extraordinary Cuban poets of the twentieth century that begs to be studied by students of Latin American and Caribbean literature, poetry, and translation, as well as by writers and readers of global literature. Ángel Escobar is a poet’s and philosopher’s poet, whose every turn of phrase is as intensely maneuvered in Kristin Dykstra’s translation as it is in the original writing. Dykstra successfully translates the anguish, solitude, and pain involved in Escobar’s unraveling of the margins of experience. What we come to understand is a pervasive mood of both disconnection and connection, not through formal equivalence, but rather through a dynamic one.” —Jacqueline Loss
The first full-length book by Escobar to be translated into English.
Other Letters to Milena / Otras cartas a Milena
Mixed genre work by Reina María Rodríguez
Tr. & int. Kristin Dykstra
The University of Alabama Press, 2014
“Reina María Rodríguez is, by many measures, Cuba’s foremost living poet. This collection is unique for both its formal variety (letters, poems, and short essays) and the breadth of literary sources from which it draws. It offers a thoughtful, intimate perspective on life in the confines of post-1959 Cuba but at the same time—and belying the stereotype of Cuban cultural insularity—looks to a broader world of writers, travelers and emigrants.”—Esther Whitfield
Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat? / Oíste hablar del gato de pelea?
Poetry by Omar Pérez
Tr. Kristin Dykstra
Shearsman Books, 2010
“Perhaps […] biographical details distract us from truly grappling with his work, which, as we see in ‘The metaphysical countrygirl,’ contains mysterious and unexplained movements and connections communicated through an alluring and awkward combination of repetitive sounds and silences. [… His poems] purposefully defy easy classification, as illustrated through an anecdote Dykstra tells in the afterword about how she asked Pérez to explain the title of the book. His response: ‘Have you ever tried to make a cat fight when it didn’t want to?’” -- Daniel Borzutzky
La detención del tiempo / Time's Arrest
Poetry by Reina María Rodríguez
Tr. Kristin Dykstra
Factory School, 2005
Buy from Small Press Distribution
"Reina María Rodríguez sings across borders of real bodies and image nations. A critical voice for a poetics of the Americas hundreds of years in the making, Rodríguez's poems overflow with insistent rhythms of everyday, refracted by a hundred mirrors facing inward, adjacent, beyond; turning on the promise of each next line. This poetry expresses the necessity not of phrase or stanza, not of breath or idea... but of motion."—Charles Bernstein
Violet Island and Other Poems
Poetry by Reina María Rodríguez
Tr. Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen
Int. Kristin Dykstra
Green Integer, 2004
"Hers is the voice of a split self, a person easily inhabited by the spirits of historic figures, writers, painters and by those who would steal her vitality. In the poem 'debts,' she lists as evidence of her existence various numbers, things and people (children and friends) and the 'books they haven't stolen from me yet.' [...] Many of her poems are bathed in a 'watery light,' island poems of beach houses, porches, sand and sea. In these houses, 'the eye slithers,' under doorways, into the lives of other writers, like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. You think she's clinging, sometimes by a thread, to her patch of earth, her country, her life as a mother and a writer. But you'd be surprised if she ever lets go." –Susan Salter Reynolds, LA Times
The first full anthology dedicated to poetry by Reina María Rodríguez in English translation.
Something of the Sacred / Algo de lo sagrado
Poetry by Omar Pérez
Tr. Kristin Dykstra
Factory School, 2007
Buy from Small Press Distribution
The first full book by Omar Pérez to be translated into English.