Zoom Launch

Today I joined the zoom book launch of three new publications from Sixteen Rivers Press, a poetry collective I've admired for many years for the quality of its titles. The founders and advisor board are themselves an amazing group of poets, some of whom I have the honor of knowing and others who I only wish I knew.

The new books are The Machinery of Sleep by Patrick Cahill,  The Distant Sound by Eliot Schain, and last but not least, volume one of a 3-volume collection of translations of Ulalume Gonzalez De Leon entitled Plagios/Plagerisms. There are three translators for this collection: Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Nancy J. Morales.  Terry and John I know fairly well, and I'm so impressed by their dedication to this project. Gonzalez De Leon is worth knowing. As the Sixteen Rivers website notes:

Ulalume González de León was born in 1928 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the daughter of two poets, Roberto Ibañez and Sara de Ibañez. She studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Mexico.

While living in Mexico in 1948, Ulalume became a naturalized Mexican citizen. She married painter and architect Teodoro González de León, and together they had three children. She published essays, stories, and poems, and worked with Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz as an editor of two literary journals, Plural and Vuelta. She also translated the work of H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Lewis Carroll, and e.e. cummings.

In the 1970’s in Latin America, González de León was part of a generation of women writers challenging the traditional identities of women, marriage, and relationships. Her poetry earned her many awards, including the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the Flower of Laura Poetry Prize, and the Alfonso X Prize. Ulalume González de León died in 2009 of respiratory failure and complications of Alzheimer’s.

I'm looking forward to digging into this book a little more deeply, and would recommend it to anyone. It has a side-by-side format, so you can see both the original Spanish and the beautifully translated English.