Section

Conversation With

Michael Lee Rattigan and Mario Domínguez Parra on Trilce contemporary

Aleksey Porvin

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.

  • translation
  • poetry
  • poetics
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Thought, here, refuses to arrive pre-packaged as product. Against the myth of the solitary genius dispensing finished insight from above, Conversation With stages knowledge as what it has always actually been: collective, unfinished, made in the friction between two minds rather than handed down by one.

Each installment is a written trace of thinking as labor — two people meeting as equals, with no editorial hierarchy pre-deciding whose voice governs the exchange, letting meaning accumulate in real time rather than presenting it as a conclusion already reached elsewhere.

This is not commentary about thought; it is thought’s own unrehearsed, horizontal record — a refusal of the extractive logic that turns dialogue into content, and an insistence that understanding is something built together, in the open, or not built honestly at all.