Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism
Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism
Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism: From the Poems of John Wendell [Ten poems from Oxen Rage translated into English (e un en galego) by Erín Moure]
Author: Juan Gelman
Translator: Erín Moure
ISBN: 978-1-7329363-3-1
26 pages
Staple-bound; handmade/letterpress
Release date: March 1, 2020
Genre: Poetry, Translation Poetics
“To be transpierced by the poetry of Wendell—man without origin writing poetry without origin—as Gelman was in a time of political and poetic difficulty, as I was by Elisa Sampedrín. To occupy that astral body. My eyes and ears were in sympathetic neural response to Gelman’s Wendell (whom anyone schooled in English poetry knows does not exist). To Gelman’s voice emerging from this thing he called Wendell. To the swagger I saw in Wendell, the weary swagger. The pragmatic relation to poetry and how it beautifully wastes our time.”
—From ”Philosophically Speaking,” Erín Moure
Praise for Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism
“This is a chapbook of layers: John Wendell, Juan Gelman, Erín Moure; the other in order to come back to the self; the translation of a “translation” of a translation; Moure’s notes and stories as inextricable parts of the exploration and movement from and into different I’s; translations as the only possibility of moving and doing; and poetry as the bottom line of articulation and thought.”
About the Author
Juan Gelman (1930–2014) published more than twenty books of poetry, for which he was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Prize. Oxen Rage (translated by Lisa Rose Bradford)—which includes his “translations” of John Wendell—was published in English by coimpress in 2015. A political exile of the military junta in Argentina, Gelman lived in Europe, the United States, and ultimately as a naturalized citizen in Mexico.
About the Translator
Erín Moure is a poet and translator. In Canada, the USA, and the UK, she has published 18 books of poetry, a coauthored book of poetry, a volume of essays, a book of short articles on translation, a poetics, and two memoirs, and she is (co-)translator of 19 books of poetry and two of creative nonfiction (biopoetics) from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, and Spanish. Three of her own books have appeared in translation, one each in German, Galician, and French. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, A.M. Klein Prize twice, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize (twice for translations) and a two-time finalist for a Best Translated Book Award (USA-Poetry). A 40-year retrospective of her poetry, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press. Her translation into Frenglish from the Portuñol of Brazilian Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea appeared in 2017 from Nightboat Books. Her own latest is The Elements (Anansi, 2019), which she calls “a book of Dad.”