'Things that Function Like Truth': Translating Contemporary Poetry from Latin America

Contemporary branding activity driven by the tourism industry, scholars find, affects perceptions of cities and nations around the globe. Branding practices actively message the public with images of what places “are like” and may even suggest how things “should be.” Literature has long been a space for contesting perceived truths about other places and times – and, just as important, about the self perceiving them too.
What can we learn from a sustained cross-cultural engagement with poetry? This genre may deploy language validating unanswered questions or resisting formulations associated with convenience, efficiency, profit, standardization; it may attempt to capture something of the interior life unseen through other forms of language. This talk incorporates short readings to explore how the questioning or construction of truths surfaces in recent translation projects.
Marcelo Morales expresses direct awareness of branding’s impact on identities and experience throughout his new transnational collection, The Star-Spangled Brand (2025). He suggests a consistent need for other kinds of truth in poems exploring both Havana and Miami in the late 2010s.
Another new bilingual edition, Jigs and Lures (2024), features selected poems from the early 2000s by Reina María Rodríguez. The book expands on recognition of this internationally distinguished writer’s poetic quest for insight across her long and storied career. Poems in Jigs and Lures address facets of the past and the present, of rootedness and migration, family and community, through the “catch and release” of poetic reflection.
Whether the original poems may have been published for nearly two decades before appearing in English translation (Jigs and Lures) or appeared for the first time this year in the bilingual edition alongside the English translation (The Star-Spangled Brand), tasks of the translator can support discussions of issues still unpublished in Spanish-language reviews or scholarship. In this way, translation contributes to geographically asymmetrical conversations around authors and works. What impact might translation have today for international literary “archives” both conceptual and physical? Princeton is an especially interesting place to discuss Rodríguez, since the University Library holds her papers, a still-incomplete archive of the poet’s work and life.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies

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