Description
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Political poetry takes on a new definition in Jaime Huenún's FANON CITY MEU, where the voices of the colonized and their colonizers form a dissonant choir bearing testimony to the centuries of violence that have shaped Latin America. Inspired by Martinican intellectual Frantz Fanon, the book examines issues of race, colonialism, and revolution through a poetic discourse that only seems to find solace in irony. In this volume, Huenún, a renowned Chilean-Mapuche poet, draws parallels between the alienation of South American indigenous peoples and the experiences Fanon documented in the Caribbean and Algeria, breaching national and linguistic barriers that often work to isolate the "wretched of the earth."
FANON CITY MEU is Huenún's second full-length collection of poetry to be translated into English, following PORT TRAKL in 2008. Both books form part of an ongoing project to engage with the work of prominent international poets and intellectuals, such as George Trakl and Osip Mandelstam. Huenún questions the limits of so-called indigenous literature without abandoning issues relevant to the Mapuche struggle for self-determination, urging readers to reflect on the inseparable bond between language and politics.
Author Bio
Jaime Luis Huenún was born in 1967 in Valdivia, southern Chile. He is an award-winning Mapuche-Huilliche poet writing in Spanish. His books include Ceremonias (1999), Puerto Trakl (2001), Reducciones (2012), FANON CITY MEU (2014), and La calle Maldestam y otros territorios apócrifos (2016). He has received numerous awards, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and the Chilean National Council on Arts and Culture's Best Work of Literature 2013 for Reducciones. He has also edited several anthologies of Mapuche and Latin American indigenous poetry, including Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü: 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (Lom, 2003), Los Cantos Ocultos: Antología de poesía indígena latinoamericana (2008), and Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (2013). His poetry was first introduced to English-language readers in Cecilia Vicuña's ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets (1998) and later in the full-length book, PORT TRAKL (2008), translated by Daniel Borzutzky. FANON CITY MEU was translated into Italian in 2015.
Jaime Huenún currently lives in Santiago, Chile, where he works in the Chilean Ministry of Culture's Department of Intercultural Studies, prior to which he taught literature at several Chilean universities, including the Universidad Diego Portales and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. He has been invited to many international literary events in the United States, England, Spain, Australia, Colombia, and Argentina. Aside from English, his poetry has been translated into Mapudungun, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan.
Author City: USA
Thomas Rothe is a scholar and translator. He is currently finishing a PhD in Latin American Literature at the Universidad de Chile and teaches part-time at the Universidad Católica de Chile. His translations have appeared in The Arkansas International, MAKE Magazine, Asymptote, InTranslation, Jacket2, and Lunch Ticket, among other journals. He has translated several volumes of poetry, including Jaime Huenún's FANON CITY MEU, Rodrigo Lira's TESTIMONY OF CIRCUMSTANCES, Julieta Marchant's The Birth of Thread, and Emma Villazón's Expendables. With Lucía Stecher, he recently translated into Spanish Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously.
Author City: USA