New Luis Chaves Poems Translated & Introduced at Circumference

At Circumference: Poetry in Translation, three poems by Luis Chaves, translated and introduced by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim. "Every Sunday for the last twenty-four months," they write, "our task as translators has been to keep up with the hyper-caffeinated imagination of Costa Rican poet Luis Chaves, rendering each image in his remarkable new collection of poetry in a way that orients the reader and provides a moment’s stasis and clarity before 'the waves come and the waves erase it.'" More:

The project of successfully re-creating the experience of reading Luis Chaves really began to come together when, over drinks at Mercadito in New York City’s East Village, Guez invited Zighelboim into the process of co-translating the collection [Equestrian Monuments].

Our paths crossed for the first time at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. A handful of conversations about poetry we exchanged in 2010 set Guez up to introduce Zighelboim’s work at the annual Thesis Reading that spring. It also gave us a window into one another’s sensibility, what we were reading, writing and translating at the time, and the extent to which we could trust and admire one another’s eye and ear. Most importantly, that small-scale collaboration hinted at the kind of ambition, humor, integrity, persistence and care that would allow us to do some extraordinary work together on a much larger-scale.

Ever since that drink at Mercadito, we have been meeting at one of our two apartments or a café close by almost every week. Beginning with the literal translation, we engaged in a five-part process with each piece.

In the first phase, our aim was simply to be generative. We wanted to come up with as many counterfactuals as we could. All of the options we could create for a given word or phrase were lined up, one after another, separated only by a back-slash. This was our divergent phase, and it was the most playful one.

In our second phase, we wanted to narrow the options down. The trimming would literally halve the size of our drafts. This was our convergent phase, and, of them all, it was the most straightforward.

Then, the goal was to narrow the field of our focus even further (and, at this point, we weren’t tinkering with any of the options we had come up with before). If something didn’t work—even if it was completely accurate, and even if we couldn’t put our finger on why it didn’t attain what Kierkegaard (by way of Walter Lowrie’s translation) called a “primitive lyrical validity” in English—it was highlighted and removed from the list we had bracketed-out before.

Read all at Circumference. And to read another Chaves poem under the translation hands of Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim, check out "Equestrian Monuments (A Litany)" from this month's issue of our own Poetry.