Current Book Project

Radical Re/Turns: Poetics of Translation in the Latin American Long Sixties

This project is a comparative study of experimental poetics during the long 1960s (1959-1973) and the inter-American Cold War. I take a rigorously historical approach to reading some of the era’s most important poetic experiments, which have mostly been interpreted as peripheral to the political mobilizations and heightened continentality of the long decade. I examine poetry collectives, magazines, and experimental books, alongside their manifestos, pamphlets, and performances. Chapters begin in Caracas, Lima, Mexico City, Havana, and Santiago to then illuminate inter-regional, hemispheric, and planetary exchanges. Across this period and these geographies, I argue that radical poets and poetry circles engaged in what I call “neo-avant-garde re/turn”: the site-specific translation of cultural and political archives to make them of revolutionary use. These poets and collectives developed projects to strategically awaken historical archives of the 1920s and 1930s avant-gardes or to intervene into real-time debates of the inter-American Cold War. Their mode of handling these source texts—what I identify as historicized translation itineraries—shifted with the long decade’s changing political terrain and its conditions of revolutionary possibility. Radical Re/Turns thus reveals that experimental poets and poetry circles across the Latin American continent played active roles in delineating and negotiating the revolutionary itineraries of their era and in imagining liberatory futures for cultural and political spheres alike. In other words, the book tells a story of the hemispheric long 1960s through its experimental poetry scenes.