Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Winner of a 2019 Foreword INDIES Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Longlisted for the National Translation Award. A meditation on the power and limitations of images, THE WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH began as an homage to a magazine, The Courier, published by UNESCO. Reina María Rodríguez used the magazine's photographs of faraway places to spark an investigation of the mental landscapes comprising her own, contemporary Havana. "I think through / the breath in you; I think through / the blood in you": precisely in striving to inhabit other worlds, she pursues the self. With the original Cuban edition of this book, Rodríguez won her second Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry. This edition includes a set of co-translations by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen, and an interview with Rodríguez, conducted by Rosa Alcalá.
Author Bio
Reina María Rodríguez (b. 1952) lives in Havana, Cuba. Among other career awards, she has won the 2002 Alejo Carpentier Medal for Achievement in Cuban literature, Cuba's 2013 National Prize for Literature, and the 2014 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Prize for Poetry. It is difficult to name her most important books due to the sustained quality of her writing. With La foto del invernadero (THE WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH), now in a bilingual edition from Ugly Duckling Presse, she took her second Casa de las Américas prize in 1998. Recent books of poetry by Rodríguez include El piano (The Piano) and Luciérnagas (Fireflies). Among her many books exploring prose and prose poetry are Páramos (Plains, which won the 1993 Julián del Casal prize as well as a 1995 National Critics' Award), Otras cartas a Milena (Other Letters to Milena, 2003; bilingual edition published by the University of Alabama Press), a novel entitled Tres maneras de tocar un elefante (Three Ways to Touch an Elephant, which won the Italo Calvino Prize), Variedades de Galiano (Galiano St. Variety), Otras mitologías (Other Mythologies), and La caja de Bagdad.
Author City: HAVANA CUB
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. Dykstra is principal translator of THE WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH (Ugly Duckling Presse), by Reina María Rodríguez, Winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Finalist for the National Translation Award. With Kent Johnson she co-edited MATERIA PRIMA, a team-translated anthology featuring Berenguer (also from Ugly Duckling), Finalist for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award. Previously Dykstra translated collections by Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Ángel Escobar, Tina Escaja, and others. Her poetry collection Dissonance: Its Ridgelines / Disonancia: Perfil de laderas, is forthcoming in a bilingual edition with translations by Escaja; excerpts appear in Lana Turner, Almost Island, Clade Song, Seedings, La Noria, El Nieuwe Ac´, Distropika, and Acrobata.
Author City: USA