Description
Published in a trilingual edition in August 2022 by Mexico City’s Pluralia Ediciones, In the Belly of Night and Other Poems draws from Irma Pineda’s early poetry collections. Written in Isthmus Zapotec, then translated into Spanish and English, these poems evoke tragedy and celebrate the ways in which the human is built from dream, tradition, and nature. Self-translated as “mirror-poems” by Pineda, these works show us how translation serves as a means of cultural preservation and political resistance to the forces that seek to criminalize languages or dangerously render them extinct. In these pages, rivers have disappeared into deserts, the dead are honored and celebrated, language transforms pain into meaning, memory, and light.
An excerpt from translator Wendy Call’s introductory essay in the book, and several poems, appeared in Latin American Literature Today in March 2023. This review in the literary journal Terrain gives a good overview of the collection’s main themes. The book was also reviewed in River Mouth Review and World Literature Today. Seattle poet and Cascadian Poetics Lab podcaster Paul Nelson also interviewed Call about the book in November 2022. You can listen to the interview here. One of the six release events that Irma Pineda and Wendy Call did for this book in Mexico, in October 2022, is archived here. You can also hear Irma Pineda reading the original Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish versions of three poems, with an accompanying essay by Call, published in Orion in 2014.
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About the Author & Translator
Irma Pineda is an author, editor, translator, and educator in Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her seventh book of bilingual Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec poetry is Naxiña’ Rului’ladxe’ / Rojo Deseo (Red Desire) (Pluralia Ediciones, 2018). She is the only woman to have been president of Mexico’s association of indigenous-language authors, ELIAC. Pineda serves on the faculty of the National Teachers University in Ixtepec, Oaxaca.
Wendy Call is an author, editor, translator, and educator in Seattle. Her book No Word for Welcome (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) won the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction. Her translation of Irma Pineda’s poetry has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar to Colombia and serves on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
