On March 2, PEN America held its 2020 Literary Awards Ceremony at The Town Hall on West 43rd Street, New York City.
The 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation went to The Winter Garden Photograph (UDP, 2019) a collection from Reina María Rodríguez and principal translator Kristin Dykstra with co-translator Nancy Gates Madsen, the edition includes an interview with Rodríguez, conducted by Rosa Alcalá.
Reina María Rodríguez lives in Havana, Cuba and has won numerous awards for her work. With the original Cuban edition of this book, Rodríguez won her second Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry.
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. Rodríguez used the magazine’s photographs of faraway places to spark an investigation of the mental landscapes comprising her own, contemporary Havana.
Dykstra and Gates Madsen previously co-translated an anthology featuring Rodríguez, Violet Island and Other Poems (Green Integer, 2004). Gates Madsen then turned her focus to scholarship, focusing on Argentina and the Southern Cone, while Dykstra continued to translate more contemporary Latin American poetry, most often from Cuba. When Dykstra decided to complete the rest of The Winter Garden Photograph, they updated a set of co-translated poems that had appeared in the anthology, while Dykstra independently finished the rest of the book.
In an interview for the University of Alabama Press, “Why Cuban Poetry?”, Kristin Dykstra speaks of her work and interest in translation “as a way to explore the fabric not only of a single poem, book, or writer, but of a poetry community.”
“Elements of chance and pattern together create a trajectory for my translations.”
Kristin Dykstra wrote about the Havana in Rodríguez’s for a feature on Poetry Society of America (Kristin Dykstra on “in Beckett’s South-Eastern Railway Terminus,” by Reina María Rodríguez), an excerpt from “in Beckett’s South-Eastern Railway Terminus” in The Winter Garden Photograph is also included in the feature:
Rodríguez’s city is part of many souths, potent states of mind. Her Havana is a capital city of Latin America, historically imagined as a southern network of places existing in opposition to an Anglo north. Havana has sometimes affiliated with other souths too, and in the twenty-first century one can ask how its filaments of imagination thread through a “global” south.
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“Rodríguez.. defers any exact finding of place or self. Yet she discovers a ‘we’ somewhere out there too, and maybe you are part of it…”
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In The Winter Garden Photograph, Rodríguez showcases a south inside her head. It carries one of the key traits of her city’s contemporary poetry scene: a sharp, insightful desire to converse with poetry from around the world.
Dykstra and Gates Madsen grew up together in Wooster, Ohio, where they attended Wooster Public High School together. Dykstra dedicated the award to Nydia Roque (1931–2015), their beloved teacher of Spanish at Wooster High — like Reina María Rodriquez, the Roque family is also from Cuba. Dykstra spoke to the importance of the public school teachers of language and noted that translation is a bridge, and our education system is an essential support for the U.S. side of the bridge.
The judges for the 2020 Poetry in Translation Award were Michael Eskin, Forrest Gander, and Pierre Joris (you can read more on all PEN literary award judges here). In their citation for The Winter Garden Photograph, they wrote:
“Almost impossibly, the translators negotiate the definitive peculiarities of Rodríguez’s unique phrasing with inspired English versions that neither normalize, dumb-down, nor exoticize the magic of the originals.”
In her series for Jacket2, “Intermedium”, Dykstra offers commentary on translation:
Via translation, writers & artists & thinkers with distinct, overlapping, or simply proximal aesthetics gain some form of potential, a potency.
Translators — & now I’m specifically thinking of the poetics advanced by writer/translator Omar Pérez — may not resolve inequities of hemispheric life, but they can envisage turns.
For more, Reina María Rodríguez’s PennSound author page has links to recordings and videos, and a recorded interview between Rodríguez and Charles Bernstein is on Clocktower.
To purchase the book from UDP, click here.
To purchase the book from Small Press Distribution, click here.
For more on the PEN Awards ceremony: PEN America’s press release about the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards
