The title of this book evokes the "other" September 11: Chile's September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román's work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version into English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.
Contributors include Daniel Borzutzky, Alexis Almeida, Patrick Greaney, Daniel Beauregard, Robin Myers, J'ssica Pujol Duran, Whitney DeVos
Poetry. Hybrid. Latinx Studies. Translation.
Carlos Soto-Román is a poet, translator, and pharmacist. He holds an M.A. in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Naropa. While living in the United States for five years, he was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets Collective and obtained an artist's residency at the MacDowell Colony. He has participated in numerous readings, symposia, talks and festivals in Chile, the U.S. and Europe. He recently taught a course in Stetson University's MFA of the Americas and he actively collaborates in various visual and musical poetry projects, including the bands "Radio Magallanes" and "Sonora Guantánamo."
Thomas Rothe is a scholar and translator. He is currently finishing a PhD in Latin American Literature at the Universidad de Chile and teaches part-time at the Universidad Católica de Chile. His translations have appeared in The Arkansas International, MAKE Magazine, Asymptote, InTranslation, Jacket2, and Lunch Ticket, among other journals. He has translated several volumes of poetry, including Jaime Huenú;n's Fanon City Meu, Rodrigo Lira's Testimony of Circumstances, Julieta Marchant's The Birth of Thread, and Emma Villazón's Expendables. With Lucía Stecher, he recently translated into Spanish Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously.
