Marguerite Feitlowitz
Photo by David Anderson
Bio
Marguerite Feitlowitz is an author, translator, professor of literature at Bennington College, and founder of Bennington Translates, a multidisciplinary, cross-college literary and humanities translation program. A former Bunting Fellow and two-time Fulbright Fellow, she is the author of A LEXICON OF TERROR: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, which was a finalist for the PEN New England-L.L. Winship Award.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of two books of prose poems by Chilean poet Ennio Moltedo. Moltedo (1931-2011) is regarded as one of the great Chilean poets of the 20th century, known for the inventiveness of his political poems, his mastery of extreme concision, and his connection to the sea. Considered his greatest work, Night is a collection of 113 poems ranging from lyric to minidrama to microfiction, or sometimes all three at once. New Things was published in the year of his death and consists of 116 poems Moltedo himself called "folded poems," constructed with references, wrinkles, and reconfigurations of his longstanding themes. Of his eight collections of poetry, none have appeared in English.
Reading, writing, and translating have always been fluid in my work and life. Translation projects have led to primary research and original books; my own writing has created affinity with authors whose work I have been drawn to translate. My work has always been concerned with how collective disaster, and the memory of disaster, affects our relationship to language: to narrative form, the making of images, the rhetorical framing of theater. I am drawn to writers whose response to repression and trauma is to radically remake form and genre, to refuse received notions of meaning and convention, and to expose not just the imposition of terror, but also the ways terror gets internalized and passed on, even in times of apparent security. Sustained immersion in testimony, setting, and history has been essential to all of my projects. Since 2002, I’ve taught literature and literary translation at Bennington College.
I came to this project through serendipity in December 2016, when having been invited to speak at a Human Rights and Education Conference at the University of Chile Law School, I first went wandering around Santiago, turned into a lovely little square and found the bookstore everyone had been telling me about: Librería Ulíses. In I went; before long my arms were full of recently published books I wanted to buy. And then, over my shoulder, came a booming voice: “Basta con la narrative argentina! Este es al país de poetas!” (“Enough with the Argentine novels! This is the land of poets!”) The voice came from a surprisingly delicate-looking man—Jorge Rosemary, bookseller, poet, publisher—who sat me down and for the next two hours brought me book upon book of Chilean poetry. My reaction to Moltedo was immediate and physical: as I read, the lines (from La Noche) felt like they were passing right through me.
Given my many years of work on Argentine state terrorism (I’m the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, and the translator of Griselda Gambaro and Luisa Valenzuela) and, to a lesser degree, on the Pinochet prosecution, the subject matter of La Noche was in many ways familiar. At the same time, much in Moltedo’s writing has been fresh and bracing. Because my Spanish is so Argentinean, Moltedo’s rhythms have been a challenge. But what a pleasure it has been to retrain my ear, to listen, to hear anew a language in which I’ve lived for much of my life.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to immerse myself in Moltedo’s work and to translate two of his books. This opens up a whole new avenue, initiates a new adventure, in my long career.