 to welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a translator of Spanish and French and a professor at the City University of New York. And I'm here with Allison Markin Powell, who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn Translation Committee and has been a driving force co-organizing the conference that you are now attending. Translating the Future, which commemorates the world of translation, the first international conference on literary translation held in the United States, convened by the Penn American Center and its translation committee in New York City 50 years ago this month. Thank you, Esther. And welcome to everyone joining us for the third installment of our weekly series. Today's program is Global Ecopoetics, a conversation between two renowned people of letters, Forrest Gander and Raquel Sarasvidera. Forrest is a poet, translator, essayist and novelist who lives in California. And Raquel is a poet and translator living in Puerto Rico. You can read their impressively full bios on the Center for the Humanities website. Forrest and Raquel will be talking about poetry, translation, climate change and public health. They should be able to wrap all that up in about 45 minutes, no problem. We're particularly grateful to World Poetry Books held by Ann Carson as publishers of excellent new books in unusually excellent translation, excuse me, for generously sponsoring today's conversation. Find them online at worldpoetrybooks.com. This series of weekly one hour conversations will be the form that translating the future continues to take throughout the summer and into the fall. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September of this year, several marquee events will happen, including a symposium, a flight of Tokartuk translators featuring several of Nobel laureate Olga Tokartuk's translators into various languages, English, Japanese and Hindi, among others. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with compelling conversations about the past, present and future of literary translation and its place in the world where we now find ourselves. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for Translating for the Future, Children's Literature in Translation, a conversation between Daniel Hong and Lawrence Schimmel moderated by Lynn Miller-Lachman. And please check the Center for the Humanities site for future events in this series. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translationresources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Raquela Sarasriveda and Forrest Gander to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream, our recording will be available on the HowlRound and the Center for Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Raquela and Forrest, we'd like to offer our sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Kimi Graduate Center, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America. Now, Forrest and Raquel, over to you. Hola. Hola. Hi. Me alegra estar aquí. A mi también me alegra estar aquí, va tarde. Bueno, Forrest and I agreed that we would start with me and then kind of Forrest would read and then we can kind of have a conversation. Así que voy a empezar, voy a leer de mi libro while I sleep under the bed is another country publicado by Bertel L. C. And in the middle of May 19th, I'm already forgetting dates. This book was written almost immediately after Hurricane Maria's passing. So it was my way of coping with what was happening. What is the record if not a scar as long as a coffin filled with mud? Hasta la cinco. Long as in death relief. No duermo porque el vecino no apaga el generador. Relief is dead. Sin contaminación lumínica, con contaminación rosita. Breathe that delayed flight. Casi no pude verte. Puerto Rico, translation, death by court. Si te visito, debo beber de tu agua. A fissure opens the Jones Act just long enough to add sealants. Una vecina atrajo conmigo, solar powered cooking. La papacula sabe un poco a pepinino. You cannot keep FEMA, the military, and the first responders in Puerto Rico forever. Lo que tenemos hoy nota para una mía que desea suicidarse después del huracán. Nadie nos enseña a aceptar la muerte porque la muerte, esa muerte de la tita queda vacía nosotros y gran hueco del carajo que nos quiere devorar. Nadie nos dice cómo podemos integrarnos al nuevo mundo imposible de mañana como se supone que evitemos caer en el círculo perfecto de una hojera permanente que llamamos darle cara al día. Manas como no entenderlo. Esa es la pregunta que evito con el fervor organizativo de un equipo de rescate que nunca llega. Pero te voy a decir esto. Después del deseo no siempre viene la muerte. A veces te encuentro por la calle y brillas como astro o como lámpara solar. Pero igual valen más que todos los legadores por si no te lo han dicho mil besos. Por otras veces sentirle y otras veces me llegan tus palabras como una recaudación de fondo que explota y temporaliza la verdad como un aguacate espachurrado en la cera ver de gris de tanto amar. Nos toca primero encontrar contestaciones mejores que estas mierdas automáticas. No lo digo por añadir responsabilidades sino para que sepa que el mar, el intento de matar nos viene desde adentro. Como último refugio de un colonialismo covarde. No podré sanar lo insondable. Pero qué mundo sería esto sin ti. Qué mundo este que te acosa. Si en rescate hablemos del futuro. Y realistas ni visionarios hablemos del futuro. Porque lo encontraremos en la alfombra carcomida. En el té de campanillas. En el buenos días hay café de un abrazo confuso y sincero. Tenemos cama y memorias. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, non, non, non, non, non. stories, stories na tábridge, where all the movies I relate, Mina, how not to understand? That is the question I avoid with the organizational fervor of a rescue team that never arrives, but I'll tell you this, desire isn't always followed by death. Sometimes I run into you in the street and you shine like an orb or a solar lamp, but you are still worth more than all the generators in case you haven't been told a thousand times. The other times, without him, the other times, your words reach me like a fundraiser that explodes and temporalizes truth. Like I'm in Baturau, squashed, flattened, spread, I walk out down the sidewalk, green gray from so much loving. You first have to find better answers in these automatic things. I don't say this to add responsibilities, but rather so that you know, sister, that the attempted murder comes from within like the last refuge of a cowardly colonialism. Come here and I'll give you food and shelter while I have it. The Daniel and your will, carol, spoil, hold, and rock, and sing, move, and we'll duplicate the hugs. I can't feel the fathomless, but what kind of world would this be without you? What kind of world is this that harasses you? Without rescue, let's speak of the future. Not as realists, not as visionaries. Let's speak of the future because we will find it in a mafia in broad, in the tea of the drunken tree. And then when those Diaz, there is coffee of a confused and sincere embrace, we have a bed and we remember this forever, again. In the river, I left my wallet. In the river, the keys. In the river, my door. In the river, a body uncounted. In the mud, a river. Si de la tierra nacimos, a la tierra retornamos. Si de la luz nacimos, hacia la luz retorneamos. Si del fuego aprendimos, si del fuego. Public schools are not ready to open. We must first make sure they are up to pre-hurricane standards. La biblioteca del manese cerrada. We speculate under the stars naming each after someone we may not find. A theme park called Paradise. Por Inquil, Florece. Rage as a passive form of mourning. Mourning as an active form of rage. No sé si tiene comida para los gatos. When she saw the leafless trees, she thought winter was a hurricane. Me dio el PPFB. Over them all, loudspeakers, they kept calling out maize. Me dijo que los puertes pequeños hablan español en inglés. When the cameras stopped rolling, they looked away. Estamos bien. They are used to having house insurance for the fire, blood insurance for the storm. Outros le va peor. Life insurance for the kids. Lo peor es el frío. Degrees upon degrees of assurance for guaranteed future. Lo peor son los moquitos. We don't accept Puerto Rican ideas. La labor pedagógica diaria. Flashlights getting lost filled with the blue search list. Entre la metro y la lista. Under the covers, debajo de la cama. All the single blue tarp in heaven. Pero sobran cielo plásticos en el paraíso. And when I pass it to the forest, then maybe later I'll read some translations. So before you pass it to me, can you hear me, Raquel? Yeah, I can hear you. Would you show the audience the really important, the way the book is, the Spanish and English are related? So the English, as you can see, is the, quote unquote, body of the text, even though the body of the text includes all this blank space. And the Spanish is the footnote. They don't necessarily correspond. And even those that are translations are my sort of slanted self-translations. Yeah. And then the cover too, because the cover kind of acts that out. The only difference is that the cover is in English. It's actually a verse from Lo del Sciario, the tertiary in my previous book, in which I imagine a member of the fiscal control board as a child. Not necessarily his own upbringing, right? But I was completing my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where David Spiel is a professor. He's also a member of the fiscal control board. It's four out of seven members, six to seven members that controls all of the economy. And what the Flicuan is supposed to restructure that. And it goes above the local government, above all the other bodies, and doesn't really respond to any body, governing body, but itself. And it's not democratically elected. It's kind of like an old, dark, old dictatorship board. And so as I was sort of grappling with the fact that someone who's ruled my country undemocratically was a professor at the same institution where I was studying, I did a sort of imaginative exercise in which I imagined a childhood that may or may not have existed in which he became and learned that he had a right to govern over other countries, other peoples. And so as part of that imaginative exercise, I imagined the, what the RICO is a sort of bogeyman in the child's imagination and the colonizer's imagination, sort of the monster living under the bed. The form reminds me, well, I love, I love what you did with the Spanish in English and the form of the book. And there's a writer, I mean, named Sheikh Keen from St. Vincent, who has a book at one of the Casas de las Americas prize called One a Day with Water, which also is shaped like yours, but it's more of a footnote than a translation. And it's not a different language. But the footnotes are taking you from, you know, from the text down to the bottom for this constant dialogue, which is also the subject of a new book by Monica de la Tour, sort of the dialogue that is translation and the equivalencias and what is equivalent and how translation is complicated because there aren't complete equivalences. Another sort of predestination that I would name in terms of my play with the footnote is actually a novelist, a Cuban novelist, Ana Lucia Portela, who I feel does very interesting work with footnotes and siembodillas in La Pared, in part because the footnote serves as a sort of critical commentary on the narrative voices. This is a long history of that, right? But I think, for me, it was particularly interesting because of Ana Lucia's play within that text with the idea of excess or like irrelevant itself, so the main character is named Seba, the letter that's often used in Spanish. And so I feel like I definitely drew from that notion that the footnote not only subverts the main text, but is also has a sort of Doridian deconstructive as relation and with the main text depends on the footnote. Yeah, it's the Spanish text that has the last word, that has the last comment, that makes, you know, that does the turn. I really like that. So we're going to talk this later, one of the subjects of our conversations of social justice. And the literary critic Lynn Keller, who I really admire, talks about social justice is inseparable from environmental politics. And it's already clear to everyone that the poor are going to suffer the most from climate change and that nature and culture are inextricable. It's interesting to me that during what the Australians are now calling the Black Summer when all those bushfires were destroying millions of acres and more than a billion animals. We are the poorest countries in the world, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu, which all of which suffered have suffered historically from Australia's predatory colonialism and capitalism. They offered troops and money to Australia to help battle the fires and aid the recovery. And that makes me think of how we need to reimagine a collaborative coexistence with others, human and not, across racial and class divisions and species hierarchies. And that maybe poetry can help provide the language for that kind of imagining to direct our focus on what's really at stake. I agree. And, you know, definitely Hurricane Maria is part of, right, that's large ecological disaster capitalist processes, including Hurricane Katrina, right? Like and including things that we can think of as the global south, whether or not they belong to one nation or another. But in the Puerto Rico's particular case, right, what made it complicated and painful was the fact that the Jones Act didn't actually allow ships to come into Puerto Rican ports that weren't American ships. And so people that did want to send aid, even though the act was suspended for seven days by Trump, it wasn't enough time for ships to come in and bring aid. And so the only people allowed to even really give aid were was the United States, right? Sort of cementing that impossibility of like an international, you know, collaborative exercise. And I also think that there were many wonderful things that came out of that, not despite the government, right? And something that I've been thinking about, I mentioned in our email exchange forest, right? One thing I've been thinking about a lot is the notion of of translation as a sort of aftershock or after effect, kind of riffing off of Daddy Mad Bonilla's, you know, kind of taking Campbell's idea of the shock doctrine and thinking of the aftershocks of disaster capitalism. Puerto Rico, we've definitely experienced that in the sense that, you know, Maria happened and then in January of this year, the earthquakes happened. And what I saw was that the collective organizing experiences that people had learned from Maria, they almost immediately applied after the earthquakes, meaning that nobody trusted the government to take care of the situation. And so everyone mobilized outside of governmental entities, sort of like which agricultural activists have been doing in Puerto Rico, which people who aren't necessarily agricultural activists, but simply initial solidarity have organized sort of mutual aid efforts have been doing. And it's, you know, it's, it's the aftershocks are not just that one disaster after another has occurred. And we've learned the negative effects of those, but also that we've kind of been building something akin to dual power in a way by organizing outside of governmental entities, because we know the government won't do it. Yeah, that's exactly the reimagining of collaborative activities that in the world. And this Monica's Monica de la Tour's book that this repetition 19 is also models a lot of collaborative writing exercises. And I'm noticing a number of contemporary writers are doing that with recent books, Fred Moten's most recent book. Each poem says with and then there's a big list of other people that are sort of included as like co-writers somehow in the poems. And I really like the idea of collaboration in poetry modeling an idea of social relation and social action. How do you as a translator, have you, what is a collaborative translation for you? So in, I mean, for me, it's been, it's been different for me. The collaborations have been more direct where I'm actually working with other writers or other artists often outside my genre. And then, or using, like you do, multiple languages in a translation, thinking of that as a kind of collaboration also. Would you say that to work with living writers is, um, intrinsically to be a collaborative translator? Yeah, I think so. I mean, in one sense, right, all writing is collaborative and that our language is always coming down to us from others and books are made from books. But to sort of activate that and to be responsible for calling out that all writing takes place with others in some way or another seems like it's an important moment to do that now. Let me read a couple poems that, that are connected to maybe environmental politics and, and I just lost us. There we are. Environmental politics and, and social action. This is called, these are from a new manuscript called Twice Alive. And this is called Immigrant Sea. Thinking about immigrant immigration in the US and, and borders, like environmental borders, let's see in the land. Immigrant sea, aroused by her inaccessibility, he waits aches for more of her life to live inside him, watching the breakers standing so close he can feel cheat coming off her wet scalp. What is his relation to this person before him? So familiar and foreign. The way he searches out her face, he searches out himself. Gusts, thrash crests of swell spring grasses twirl circles in the sand where they stand without speaking. She wants him to know it's all charged, even grass positive pollen negative. So when grass waves, it sweeps the air for pollen. He feels electricity all around as though the wild drama of the coming storm were already aware of them foreigners on this shore. Little sapphire blue flowers speckled the dunes. He wonders if he has let himself flatten out into a deathless sheet like escalator stares. Whether in the end, he'll disappear underground without the smallest lurch of resistance. But when her lavish face turns toward him, beaming the corners of her eyes, wind wet, he yields to that excess. He reappears to himself. And then I moved to to California just before the fires that destroyed the town closest to the town I live in, Santa Rosa. They came through there and Petaluma, the particulate matter was super high. Everyone was wearing masks. Dogs had masks. And the people from Santa Rosa came to Petaluma. And the hotels opened and people opened their houses. And it was a very moving response. Again, sort of like partly organized by the government, but also community organized collaborative. And this is a poem for Santa Rosa. These are based on on a tradition of poetry called Sangam poetry from from India, between 300 BC and 300 AD, there were there was a body of great literature in southern India called Sangam literature, one part of which were poems in which human consciousness and emotions would not be expressed, except through the environment in which people live, particularly through five particular landscapes landscapes that you find in in southern India, which I sort of translated to California. So one of those environments is wasteland or desert. Interesting in Spanish, if we if we call it wilderness in in English, wilderness has all these associate associations with openness and freedom and beauty. But most of the Spanish words for wilderness are kind of are very negative. It's emptiness. It's wasteland wasteland for Santa Rosa. Green spring grass on the hills had cured by June and by July, gone woolly and brown, it crackled underfoot desiccated while within the clamor of live oaks, an infestation of tiny larva clung to the underleaves, feeding between veins, their frass, that fine dandruff of excrement and boring dust, tinkled as it dropped onto dead leaves below the limbs, you could hear it 20 feet away, tinkling across the valley on Sugarloaf Ridge, the full moon showed up like a girl doing cartwheels, no one goes on living the life that isn't there. Below a vast column of smoke, heat, flame and wind, I rose swaying and tottering on my erratic vortex, extemporizing my own extreme weather, sucking up acres of scorched topsoil and spinning it outward in a burning sleet of filth and embers that catapulted me forward with my mouth open in every direction at once. So I came for you turning, turning the present into purgatory, because I need to turn everything to tragedy before I can see it, because it must be leavened with remorse for the feeling to rise. Maybe I'll stop there and we'll talk about some other poets and translations. Okay, let's talk about some other poets. Well, I'm looking formally at these poems that you sent out. Maybe I'm over-reading, right? But some of them reminded me a little bit of song, you know, in some ways, a little differently structured, but a wave structure. And I especially like thinking of the ocean, thinking of the sea as a border, thinking again of the cat's crit crack, right? Of the fact that in Puerto Rico, most immigration that comes into Puerto Rico happens by way of water, right? I don't know, it's such a different conversation at the same time, this same conversation. And in terms of migration to Puerto Rico right now where I am, right? It's historically very working class, historically a lot of Dominican immigrants, it's been changing, it's been gentrified, happened a while back, even though there's been a great deal of resistance, but of course, organizing that resistance has been very hard, especially if people are undocumented. But I don't know, maybe you can talk a little bit more about formally what was going on with, maybe I'm, maybe I over-read what was happening on the page. Oh, well I was thinking about, so I mean that last poem, there are caesuras that separate sections of the poem that act out the division between self and other and between maybe two sides of a border. But maybe as we talk, you'll integrate into the conversation for a lot of us gringos who don't know the history of Puerto Rico and the immigration, which I mean there were slaves brought in from Africa, people from the Azores came, people from South America. And then those 400 years of, I'm very interested in the way that the politics of language differs in Puerto Rico than it does in Latin America or Mexico, where the movements in the last 25 years have been towards recovering indigenous languages. And in Puerto Rico, even though there are like 40,000 people who claim to have a tino ancestry, that really you're trying to recover a colonial language, but is it a colonial language at this point after 400 years? And those kinds of questions are interesting to me and maybe to others. Thank you. It's a really good question. I recently was with an incredible panel in Oaxaca in their Festival of Literature, and Yasnaia, a linguist, poet, and scholar of indigenous languages basically talked, we kind of had this beautiful dialogue specifically about that, right, in which of course she's interested in not Spanish, right, as the official language, as they sponsored national language, but on kind of decolonizing that, right, and pushing against that. And you know, one of the most beautiful things she said was of course that the notion of binary language, binary genders, you know, and language came with colonialism because in her language, there are 14 different gender expressions, right, which is, you know, not uncommon to most linguists. Of course, I think what you're asking about and that difference that you're kind of noting also has to do with the Caribbean. I was very lucky because my mother is a linguist who studies Creole languages and works specifically in Pajamento. So I was, you know, exposed to sort of notions that there's no better Spanish or worse Spanish or anything like that, right. And that the Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish is just another dialect of Spanish, whether or not it's recognized as standard, and that there are a lot of racialized notions that go into which types of Spanish are seen as wider and which ones are some that's black or which are some that's poor. And so I very much defend the particularities of Puerto Rican Spanish and Desna and I had this beautiful kind of conversation in which we talked specifically about, you know, the similarities actually in terms of sort of like the colonial projects that we're taking on and that language right exists in its context. So what does that can say like something like it language exists in the mouth that then inside of the mouths that seek it for something on the tongues, right, the materiality of languages is the context in which takes place. And yes, Spanish in Puerto Rico, etymologically, right, historically was the colonizer's language. At this point, you know, Taino as a language no longer exists, even though the words many of the lexicon has entered into our vocabulary and that is part of our lives, right. As a living language, we don't know how those words were pronounced. And the records we have, right, of that language are the colonizer's records of that language, which of course are filtered through the colonizer Spanish. That doesn't mean that the Spanish that we speak now is the colonizer's language necessarily, right. I think all of that is mediated by class and race, etc. And it was an attempt after 1898, when the US invaded Puerto Rico to impose English, it failed. Most Puerto Ricans don't speak English on the island, right. Most Puerto Ricans on the island, you know, can say a word or two, maybe a sentence or two, but are not fluent English speakers. And that became very apparent after Maria, when there was a migration wave, and you had diasporic Puerto Ricans living a long time in the US who didn't speak English, and a new diaspora coming in that didn't speak any English at all, trying to communicate in community spaces. It became very evident that Puerto Ricans are migrants, whether or not they're undocumented in other ways, right, they go through the same sort of colonial processes and difficulties that immigrants in the US have to face, especially around language and colonialism. Of course, right, this is a debate we can continue having, right, because there is, you know, like a class of, you know, a more upper class version of Spanish that, you know, notions that have internalized colonialism of colonialism, right, that certain classes of Puerto Rico have a certain internal agency has that, like, there's a wrong way to speak Spanish and that Puerto Ricans need to be corrected. You know, I grew up hearing things like a language, defectual somente, defectual sign, defective language, defective mind, right, these ideas that there's a right way to speak. And of course, I am very much against that, which is why I try to integrate the way that I speak, not just into how I read, but into how I write, which I'm honestly following in the footsteps of Puerto Rican writers like Chameleon this, who created an entire system of phonetic, attempted to create a whole system of phonetic writing, but through sonnets. And so he used very traditional sonnets. You can't read them if you aren't Puerto Rican basically, so you'd have to understand, like, right, you'd have to be able to read it through Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish. That's great. Thank you so much for walking through that. There's a writer who I like a lot who has a new book out who talks about translation as being an anti-neocolonialist mode. And who also writes about this, her new book is called a DMZ Colony. It's Don Meche. And the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea ends up being, I mean, you call Puerto Rico a theme park paradise. And what people have called the DMZ as an accidental paradise, because although it's guarded so heavily on both sides, in between this area, it's environmentally super rich with flora and fauna, because nobody goes there. It's untouched. So, and one of the things she does in her book, new book, she translates the flights of snow geese. So what it looks like, that's, she translates those into, actually, they're saying DMZ in here. But she also, I thought I'd read a, even I'd read a page from her book. Mirror words come out of my thoughts about translation. Translation is a mode equals translation is an anti-neocolonial mode. I obsess about, quote, order words that are given in our society, unquote. In 1945, it took less than 30 minutes for order words to be carried out to divide the country I was born in along the 38th parallel North. Order words compel division, war, and obedience around the world. But other words are possible. Translation is an anti-neocolonial mode. As an anti-neocolonial mode can create other words. I call mine mirror words. Mirror words are meant to compel disobedience, resistance. Mirror words defy neocolonial borders, blockades. Mirror words flutter along borders and are often in flight across oceans, even galaxies. Mirror words are homesick. Mirror words are halo. Mirror words are orphaned words. Now look at your words in a mirror. Translate. Translate. Did you? Do it again. Do it. In a sense, it's great, isn't it? Yeah. And your words are sort of mirror, you know, this from top to bottom, but in a way that transforms them from any kind of order words or logical translation. She's one of the most incredible translators, I think, working right now. I totally agree. And I think translation, I don't think translation is intrinsically always just like language, the colonial, but I think when she does what it is, right? And I think it's important to defend that. And I think honestly, I think of Puerto Ricans as translators, all of us to a certain extent have to translate our reality, not just to those who have colonized us, but right to the rest of the world. The specificity of Puerto Rico has in and the fact that we've been kind of forced to migrate has turned us all to a certain extent into translators. So I come from people that are translators. And what you said earlier about the Spanish that's spoken in Puerto Rico, it's not the Castiano that's spoken in, you know, in Valencia, Madrid. It's a different Spanish. And what Don Me has done and what the woman she translates primarily Kim Heisun, they're writing in a very patriarchal culture where the language of poetry is a very male language. And they've had to reinvent a new feminist language, non patriarchal language. And that's part of why their project is so exciting. Do we have time for translations to retranslations? I don't even know. Are we entering the question segment in the minute? We are actually, we are. I mean, we've had a few questions. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation. We've had a few questions come in. So maybe we'll take those and see if there's time, see how long you want to dwell on those. And then if there's time, maybe we can get to some more readings. But we've had Magdalena Edwards has sent in some great translator. Yes, she sent in some some juicy questions, three juicy questions. I'm going to read them to you. And you can sort of swim around in them if you like or to take your choice. Number one, could you each speak more about collaborative and co-created poetry texts, whether published via traditional publishers or performed within community and for audience? Number two, how do bilingual and multilingual texts in our contemporary publishing world? And how might they subvert the insistence on monolithic monolingual authorship? And three, how do you see the role of the poet transforming as you and your collaborators translate the future today? So I'm happy to reread any of those if you want to sort of take part of that and go and if that inspires you. Yeah, that's a lot. So the collaborative collaboration in writing, you know, some of the examples I would bring up are Monica De La Tour's new book, which is full of exercises that she's done with students, imagining writing in invented languages. And it's dialogic all the way through. It's really, it's multiple voices in her work. And the Fred Moten's book, All That Beauty, where he just credits all these other people as being sort of participants in his writing process, or Joan Ritalic, who has a new book coming up. But all of her books include references to usually the same five or six writers or pseudonyms that have guided her writing all the way through. That's a, you know, thinking of Pessoa as someone who's sort of a collaborative writer also and having to collaborate with other selves, because the self isn't singular. Those seem to me to model three different ways of collaboration and writing that I have been excited about. So I became very obsessed, like many Puerto Rican poets, with a Puerto Rican poet that hasn't been translated, even though I've been working on our translations for a long time. Angela Maria Lavila, she's a very important Afro-Boribua poet from the 1970s, wrote throughout her life. And she, she wrote a book that was incredibly important for me, which was Animal Piedro y Piedro, Here's Contender Animal. And what was very interesting about this book to me was also the way it worked formally. It had a hole in the cover. And it kind of began with two epigraphs that had two different dates, and they clearly span the period of time between the dates, which actually is a sort of displaced body of the text. So the poems were written between those two dates. So the beginning and the end are placed at the very beginning of the book. And what they are is a series of voices asking the poet to search for her lineage and then a matrilineal list that includes people like Lolita de Lebron, which was a, you know, member of the National Party that shone of Congress, and then people like Sudia Versace, which was a very important composer and songwriter, and then poets like Julia de Burgos, right? And so this, this lineage was not necessarily a lineage of poets or translators, right? With the lineage of women and her mother is included, right? And she writes this book as she's pregnant. And it actually, you know, I have a complex relationship to it as a trans person, but it's, it's built in a way like a womb. And the notion is that the in the womb, right? Her son received these voices through a glass dark, right? Receive these voices as sort of echoes, right? As voices without subject attached to them, as voices without necessarily a name attached to them. And so these voices shaped her child before her child came into the world is kind of the idea. And so I kind of took that as a model for solidarity. She has actually a verse in there. It's very important to me. Segunda nuestras soledades en compañia. So compañia is also really interesting work, but our solitudes kind of form a company. That's so nice. And in the book that I've been working on this twice a live book, I try to use, I mean, our models of nature have changed and are not models of evolution are no longer seen as just this competition. But we've begun to realize that nature is all collaborative. There's no such thing as a single tree. There's a system of relationships. And liken is a good example of things that come together to form something new to invest themselves in something, something that's a collaboration. And in my attempt in this new book is to focus on that kind of collaboration in nature as a model for human collaborations. And as an example of intimacy, which is where politics, I think, begins. Do you remember the other questions, Raquel? I took a note and my note says, what does my note say? I know it says, my little text. I know the question was a lot richer than that. But I think it's the one. Yeah, go for it. I can add on the question because I actually wanted to add to it myself. I think my mind was functioning along the same lines as Magdalena's. And I really appreciate you for us for mentioning Monica de la Torre, who's a totally wonderful person and poet and CUNY call. He's going to be part of the series, actually, in conversation with Jeffrey Angles as part of a trio of events beyond the mother tongue. And your own poetry, Raquel is so bilingual. It presupposes a reader for whom all of the languages that you're putting into play on the page are richly present in some way. But what if the reader, for whom they're not, what of an active translation like, say, Achi Ovejas, taking Ana Lucia Portela's novel out of a Spanish in which it is opaque to most people who would pick it up, you know, in the United States, for example, and bringing it into an English that they can read, a different idea of translation and a different politics of translation, I think. How does your work relate to that? Well, it actually relates in a very complicated way, you know, as much as it may seem like it, while they sleep, isn't necessarily a text that wants to be read by an ideal reader that's bilingual. It's actually, I feel like, a text that replicates the violences of that in communication after the hurricane and also the violences of that difference structurally between those who can only speak Spanish and those who can only speak English. And so, you know, they're very, they're very different responses to the text depending on who's reading it. So, someone who only, I've had people who only speak English be angry at the text because they can't access half of it, right? And I have, and that to me is very telling, right? Because it's based on the notion that they should be able to access it, right? That they have a right to have access to it. It's a very interesting idea because I don't think that everyone in the world feels that way about other languages. And yet, monolingual English speakers in the US often do, they feel they have a right to understand and if they're not given immediate access to other worlds, you know, there's something wrong with the other person. And so, interestingly, you know, Puerto Ricans that can only read the Spanish, you know, associate that with the hurricane and they associate it with having to fill out forms in English that they didn't understand, you know, to talk to people who didn't speak Spanish, who came to help, right? And couldn't understand the specificities of their context. And so, in a way, there's a response to it that is an anger at the text precisely because it replicates that violence. And those who can read both, or in a way, are those who have access to both realities. And they have a mix of reactions much like myself. And so, that is, it's a very specific, it's a very particular text, but, you know, kind of expanding on your larger question. I take each text very differently. And I also think I also take each verse very differently and each word very differently. I choose not to translate very intentionally because I feel that in translating, they might be doing a violence to them. And then there are words and their aspects of it that I do want to make accessible because I do believe in the gesture of, you know, kind of reaching out towards the other as Forrest mentioned. But I believe that gesture shouldn't be kind of based on the notion of universality that erases difference because it becomes colonial. Forrest, your own multilingual practices, what sorts of readers' responses have you had? So, yeah, I've also written in bilingually kind of far back in my books. And people ask me, you know, that's the thing, you know, we don't understand this part. Why did you do that? And I encourage, it's like encountering words that you don't know in your own language, that whether or not you understand them, they have a texture and the context also gives some indication. And to wander into a territory that you don't know doesn't need to be a turnoff. It can be a sensual turn on. And that's what one hopes. It's that expectation again that you own everything and that you can understand everything that I think poetry works against, that we're interested in questioning and not in answers and we're interested in using language in ways that don't have to do with logical determinism. There are only a few minutes left, but one of the other aspects of Magdalena's question, she was asking about performance, which I think I was kind of curious about in terms of talking about these communal experiences that are inspiring these works. And if you've had the chance to perform them, I guess, asking about the kind of response or what that experience has been like for either of you. I have been working with my partner, a sculptor, Ashwini Bhatt, and we have exhibitions in which there is work and performance that happens at once, but I've also collaborated with lots of other photographers and dancers, Eko and Koma, the Buto dancers more recently just with Eko in Japan. We did a performance together, which terrified me because she's this amazing dancer. But I really love that. What about you, Raquel? I've done all sorts of collaborations, but some of them I've done not even under my name. I was part of a collective. Right after Trump was elected, we kind of created this format that could be easily replicated of like 60-point aerial font, sort of like propaganda art, where we would have these messages, these anti-fascist messages, and you could replace them anywhere. And the beauty of it was that it spread, and so it kind of like replicated Brazil, replicated London, kind of on the premise of accessing a kind of power that was not state power or not relying on the state. And it was one of the most enjoyable projects I've been a part of, honestly. It was very free not to have my name attached to something that was exclusively anti-fascist. And also just, you know, there's a lot that goes into kind of self, right, and a name. Well, that was very enjoyable for me. And I, you know, I've done almost all my books have some kind of artistic collaboration currently working with Natalia Chico, is an incredible artist working on my next book for While I Sleep. I worked with a printmaker, Mariana Ramos, incredible printmaker, long history of collaboration between poets and printmakers and political, long history of collaboration between printmakers and political in Mexico in a period of political effervescence. And so I try to think of every project as a collaboration to some extent. Fortunately, we're finished. We're out of time. Thank you for a standard. I care so much for this wonderful conversation. And we hope that it will inspire more conversations among those watching. Once again, we'd like to thank our partners, Penn America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E. Siegel Theatre Center. Please check the Center for Humanities website for our upcoming events. And we hope to see you again. Thanks so much. Thank you. Yeah, I gotta take a selfie of us. We're important. For us, say something, because if not, it's gonna be my face. Oh, yeah. It's such a pleasure to get to talk with you, Raquel. Tengo muchas ganas de espero que tengamos la oportunidad de vernos. Sí, a ver si algún día te traigo por tu típico, para que vea. Gracias por el típico. Me lo he hecho a todos en selfie, okay? Prometo. Claro, claro. Bye.