Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, born in Havana in 1955, is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers. Collections of his poetry appear throughout Latin America and Europe, and he has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking world. The selections here belong to from a red barn (desde un granero rojo), a book-length poem, the 2013 recipient of Spain’s Alfonso el Magnànim Prize, and published with the prestigious Spanish poetry press Hiperión. These texts return to the lyrical, conversational tone that characterizes Rodríguez Núñez’s early work. Yet, they are intrinsic to his most recent poetic cycle, a testament to the poet’s unique migratory experience, a conscious choice to not pick one nation over another; to be in two places at once. At its core is a rethinking of the experience of otherness in which identification with memory, quotidian experience, and place prevails over any kind of differentiation. The result is a fluid poetic subject who disrespects borders and privileges movement over fixedness. This condition is also manifest in the poem’s form. The absence of uppercase letters and punctuation, along with the extensive use of enjambment, all contribute to a sense of pushing beyond known limits, tempered by the poem’s non-rhyming sonnets. By challenging traditional notions of Cuban identity, nationalism, and politics, as well as poetic form, Rodríguez Núñez’s poetry isn’t what you’d expect to hear from a Cuban writer on or off the island.

These are precisely the kind of poets I’m interested in translating (like my work with Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, and Ida Vitale). Their writing doesn’t easily fit into the canon of Spanish-American poetry in English translation. Here, Rodríguez Núñez’s defiance of conventional ideas about national and cultural identity is perhaps what’s most difficult to bring across. It’s particularly challenging to express the poetic subject’s reality without falling into the trap of exotification. In this case, it’s the attempt to preserve the Cuban sugar mill worker’s sense of ordinariness about his experience for a general American audience. One of the ways I try to do this is by striking a balance between the use of slang and idioms and highlighting the strangeness of certain words unlikely to be associated with what is typically “Cuban.” The original also plays with these variations in register, but in some instances I emphasize it more in the translation. For example, in “2,” the line “when you piss the sea three sheets to the wind” is certainly not a literal rendering of the Spanish, while in “3,” by using “marabu patch,” I maintain the Cuban word for a troublesome invasive plant species, ubiquitously known on the island, but not elsewhere. It’s my intention that this kind of flexibility in English can represent the fluidity of the original, the poet’s reluctance to choose just one meaning, just one discourse, just one identity.

poetry-magazineFrom “from a red barn”

From “Burn the Losses”

From “from a red barn”