Date of Award

Spring 4-23-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Modern Languages & Literature

First Advisor

Katherine Hedeen

Abstract

By translating the experimental poets José Coronel Urtecho (Nicaragua), Juan Gelman (Argentina), Lizabel Mónica (Cuba), Ricardo Rafael Cabrera Núñez (Dominican Republic), and Kreit Vargas (Peru), my thesis anthology attempts to address the asymmetrical canon of Spanish-American poetry in translation in the United States. While a debate regarding the in/commensurability of political commitment and poetic experimentation has characterized much of recent Spanish-American literary culture, the United States has appropriated Hispanophone poetics in overpoliticized and essentialized ways since the transplantation of Lorca’s literary corpus in the early 50s. The United States looks to Spanish-American poetry for a means of reaffirming the region’s cultural imaginaries. On the one hand, this implies a poetics defined by the latino/anglo ethnic distinction: Pablo Neruda’s erotic Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, for example, permits the US reader to indulge in an aesthetic of eros without challenging Puritan values, given that this indulgence remains relegated to an exotic and foreign sphere. On the other, it requires a politically committed style that can confirm US stereotypes about Spanish-American political instability without requiring any interrogation of US intervention (also characteristic of Neruda). In accordance with the logics of political/intellectual incommensurability, it therefore implicates a sort of anti-academic poetics which constructs Spanish-America as a primitive and pre-Cartesian region, as evidenced by the cultural virality of Lorca’s duende. While translating poets whose works explicitly contradict these regional stereotypes, I employ a poetics defined by the use of translational impossibility as a means of resistance and emergence for the marginalized subject, which I have termed abyssal translation.

Rights Statement

All rights reserved. This copy is provided to the Kenyon Community solely for individual academic use. For any other use, please contact the copyright holder for permission.

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