Rosario Castellanos was an influential Mexican poet who wrote this piece after the government massacre of students and other protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. The poem made its way into Elena Poniatowska’s book on the massacre. The third stanza was…
I recently signed a contract to translate into Spanish the YA fantasy novel Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe García McCall. That work is well underway, and it looks like Tu Books will be publishing El verano de las mariposas in the spring of 2018.
Mario Benedetti was a prolific Uruguayan writer and poet. The tale is very simple you are born you contemplate afflicted the reddish blue of the sky the bird that emigrates the clumsy beetle that your shoe will smash bravely you suffer you cry for food and out of habit because…
Qal‘at al-Ḥamra, known by the Spaniards as Alhambra, was a Moorish fortress and castle in Granada that was captured during the Catholic Reconquista. Pleasant the voice of the water to those wearied by black sand, pleasant to the concave hand the curving marble of the column, pleasant the delicate labyrinths…
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably one of the most well-known poets in the world. This is one of his most popular poems. I like you when you’re silent, for you seem as if you’re gone, and you hear me from afar,…
At the behest of a friend, here’s my version of Bécquer’s famous poem: Eternal Love The face of the sun may darken forever, The oceans run dry in an instant of fire. The axis spinning our planet may shatter Like so much brittle crystal. Yes, all of that may happen! At…
The Labyrinth Zeus could never untangle the nets of stone that surround me. I have forgotten the men I once was; I follow the hateful path of monotonous walls which is my destiny. Straight galleries which curve in secret circles as the years wear on. Parapets cracked by the usury…
Rhyme LII Giant waves that braying break upon remote, deserted beaches, wrapped in your sheets of foam, take me with you! Hurricane blasts that rip away from the towering woods their withered leaves, dragged along in your blind whirlwind, take me with you! Tempest clouds that the sunbeam breaks and…
