Michael Lee Rattigan and Mario Domínguez Parra on Trilce contemporary
In this conversation, Aleksey Porvin, editor-in-chief of The Rang Yan Review, poet, essayist, and translator, speaks with the poets and translators Michael Lee Rattigan and Mario Domínguez Parra about their new English translation of César Vallejo’s Trilce (1922). Their starting point is the book’s fractures: broken syntax, deformed words, invented typos. They ask whether these ruptures are the marks of private grief, of a colonial linguistic history, or of both at once, and what it means to carry such a rupture into another language rather than repair it. The talk moves from prison and loss to the language of the ledger, the writ, and the inventory in which Vallejo’s dispossession was recorded, and finally to translation itself as shared labour: two translators, two sets of hands, a disagreement that stays in the English as a trace. Fluency, they suggest, may be less a virtue than a crime scene.
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