Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval. NIGHT IN THE NORTH is an autobiographical long poem that chronicles the author's experience growing up in Artigas, Uruguay, a linguistic and cultural borderland nestled between Brazil and Argentina. In a series of stark scenes, Severo revisits moments from his childhood—sketching a rare map of the subtle, yet violent, mechanisms that marginalize culturally specific communities. A luminous meditation on poverty and imaginative possibility.
"The speaker of Fabián Severo's remarkable book narrates the struggles of a life lived in a provincial town in Uruguay, but it is not the hardships that a reader will remember, but the hopes, the tender interiority, the intimate knowledge of a place this remarkable poet de-scribes. Rendered in precise and elegant English by Eglin and Kercheval, this book will be a revelation to American readers as it introduces a voice on uncommon clarity and sensitivity, both retrospective and pinned to a hopeful future, from a poet of great expressive gifts."—Mark Wunderlich
"'Life is like that / the less you have / the more you dream,' Fabián Severo's whimsical yet somber, realistic, and tireless narrator states. Written from a place called Artigas, border terrain not possessed by the people who inhabit it, in a language that 'flies loose and free through the sky,' these poems, so adeptly translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval, address troubles of poverty, displacement, and abuse in surprisingly simple yet forceful, elegant language. I too wonder 'if God exists / and we are all his children / how can there be a place you're not allowed in?'"—Curtis Bauer
"'María always tells the same story, / and her face becomes so happy / that one is filled with sadness.' Such are the many-layered emotional resonances in Fabián Severo's astonishing collection NIGHT IN THE NORTH, which follows the narrator as he records memories of daily life in a small border town in Uruguay. I am in awe of the tender intimacy Severo captures between people living through and into poverty and hardship, in the small tokens that illuminate both sorrow and richness. In sharp and precise language, Laura Cesarco Eglin and Jesse Lee Kercheval bring a much-needed voice into American literature."—Lauren Shapiro
Author Bio
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of eleven books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction including the poetry collection Cinema Muto (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award, and the story collection The Alice Stories (University of Nebraska Press), which won the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize. Her first story collection The Dogeater (University of Missouri Press) won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction, and Space (Alonquin Books), her memoir about growing up near Cape Kennedy during the moon race, won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She's also the translator of Javier Etchevarren's FABLE OF AN INCONSOLABLE MAN (Action Books, 2017).
Author City: SOUTH BEND, IN USA
Laura Cesarco Eglin is the translator of OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES by Hilda Hilst, (cooimopress, 2018), which won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She is the co-translator from the Portuñol of Fabián Severo's NIGHT IN THE NORTH (Eulalia Books, 2020). Her translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician have appeared in a variety of journals, including Asymptote, Timber, Exchanges, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, the Massachusetts Review, Cordella Magazine, Gulf Coast, Waxwing Journal, and The Puritan. Cesarco Eglin is the author of six poetry collections, including Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254, 2022), Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House, 2020), REBORN IN INK (trans. Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval; The Word Works, 2019), Calling Water by Its Name (trans. Scott Spanbauer; Mouthfeel Press, 2016), and Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune, 2015). She is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.
Lobster, International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Blood Orange Review, Timber, Pretty Owl Poetry, Pilgrimage, Periódico de Poesía, and more. Her poems are also featured in the Uruguayan women's section of
Palabras Errantes, Plusamérica: Latin American Literature in Translation. She is the founding coeditor and publisher of Veliz Books.
Author City: USA
Fabián Severo (Artigas, Uruguay) is a literature professor and writing workshop coordinator. He is the author of the books Noite nu Norte (2010), Viento de nadie (2013), NósOtros (2014) and Viralata (2015). His poems have appeared in magazines in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Spain and the United States including Words Without Borders and Poetry. His work appears in América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets (University of New Mexico Press, 2016). In 2017 he received the Uruguayan National Prize for Literature for his novel Viralata, in 2012, he received the Justino Zavala Muniz Fellowship in the Arts from the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Cultureand in 2011, he was awarded the Bronze Morsoli Medal in the Poetry from the Foundation Lolita Rubia. His novel Viralata was adapted for theater by the director Luis Vidal, and produced by the Theater El Galpón.
Author City: ARTIGAS URU