A poetry translation at Surreal Poetics

[mount_oregano]

My translation of “El Talego” (Duffel) by Fernando Cuartas, a poet from Medellín, Columbia, is in the current issue of Surreal Poetics.

This issue of the online zine is devoted to surrealism as social critique, lived experience, and marvelous nature. The poem “El Talego” deals with urban poverty.

Read it here:
http://surrealpoetics.weebly.com/issue03-cuartas-2eltalego.html

— Sue Burke

Comments

[asakiyume]

That's beautiful--especially the last few lines.

Having finished La Niña, the new Colombian telenovela we're watching is Lady: La Vendadora de Rosas, which is about a real-life person, Leidi Tabares, who starred in a film on street children, acted by street children (the film was lauded at Cannes--it was called La Vendadora de Rosas--but then the children ended up plunged back in the desperate circumstances they'd been briefly lifted out of, and many of them ended up dead or in jail--including Leidi Tabares, though she's since been released. Makes me kind of mad at the director... he just exploited them).

The drama is set in Medellín, and the scenes the poem describes map right onto the scenes in the show.

[mount_oregano]

Thank you. The editor picked out the poem, and I'm sorry to hear about the aftermath of the movie, but I'm glad the images in the poem turned out to be so real. I wonder if the poet knew about the movie?