Into Muteness
Spanish poet Sergio Espinosa's first collection of poems, Hacia la mudez, translated by Kelsi Vanada as Into Muteness, begins with a quote from Celan: “the wilding conviction / that this is to be said differently than / so.” This sentiment underlines the impossibility of speech as conveyed in these poems, which explore the intricacies of mind/body dualism in human relationships, through lines that turn on repetition and doubling, theme and variation. Linguistically complex and formally exploratory, the poems in this bilingual edition remind us to “distrust what has many names,” even as we “need ourselves in others.”
PRAISE FOR INTO MUTENESS
How does one pen a poignant silence? In Into Muteness, Spanish poet Sergio Espinosa employs thick drops of words, repeated, recontextualized, often seen through a fog, seeking focus and firing off images: “your tear crashed against the window like a gunshot of honey.” Aphoristic phrasing, mirror-poems, and an ambiguous yet engaging unspooling of phrases challenge and delight. Bringing this verse into English for the first time, Kelsi Vanada wonderfully renders the musical and agonizing mist of these audacious poems of love and illness and the limbo of muteness.
—Lisa Rose Bradford, translator of Juan Gelman’s Today
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sergio Espinosa was born in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, in 1988. His poems have been published in international anthologies and journals, and have been translated into twelve languages. Hacia la mudez is his first poetry collection (published in Spain by kriller71 ediciones in 2017) and forthcoming in France with Az’art Atelier Éditions. He also works as a translator, having translated Noah Cicero into Spanish for the anthology Vomit, which features young North American poets (published in Spain by El Gaviero in 2013).
Website: www.sergio-espinosa.com
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Kelsi Vanada is a poet and a translator from Spanish and Swedish, with MFAs in Poetry and Literary Translation. Her translations include Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa (Veliz Books, 2020), The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet (Song Bridge Press, 2018), and her chapbook Rare Earth is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Kelsi was an ALTA Travel Fellow in 2016, and the recipient of the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s 2018 Nadia Christensen Translation prize. She is the Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Cover Art by Roman Antopolsky, “khlebnikov at the radio station”
