On “I Question the Lights” and “Exile Boulevard”

In the opening poem of Akrilica, Juan Felipe Herrera writes, “Estos no son páginas, son solo astillas akrílicas en las manos.” The first act of his collection is a giving back to the reader, to the poet, to the self, to the hands. I interpret this as a guiding principle for me to make my own translations from the splinters he has gathered in his work. This, coupled with having known Juan Felipe over twenty years in capacities ranging from being an undergraduate in his Chicanx art course at Fresno State to being a collaborator on projects, poems, and his archive, affords me a familiarity and opportunity to take a creative leap in translating his poems.

This proximity to both the poet and his body of work found me asking myself what an “Akrilica poem” would look like in 2022, particularly given his evolving artistic sensibilities and style. How would he incorporate his artistic techniques using the bamboo brush and ink-heavy forms to generate much of his own visual art in a new poem with the benefit of computers and graphic design software?

In this way, my translations became a space to imagine and experiment with Juan Felipe’s visual art practice splintering and spilling into his poems. This concept left me with a more manageable framework and focus on his use of repetition, musicality of language and word choice, as well as his call and response practice in reading his poems before audiences in the translations.

This allowed me the opportunity to imagine: How would the repetition of “What?!” appear? When and where would he insert a drawing? When would he riff or when would he lean in and soar through the language?

Perhaps this is where the translator’s note ends, the realization that my only path forward in translating the poems from such a creative and genius force of nature like Juan Felipe, requires me to create experimental work that is simultaneously a visual and tonal translation to gesture toward the breadth of what his visionary work has meant to Chicanx and Latinx poets, and to poetry.