Floating Lanterns

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Deeny. "In FLOATING LANTERNS, her eighth poetry collection, Mercedes Roffé draws from a range of creation myths, sacred texts, philosophy and poetry that meditates upon human nature and our propensity for evil. She brings together Buddhism, Tibetan Yoga, the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Kabbalah, Plato's Republic, T. S. Eliot, Beat poets, the oral traditions of Medieval Spain, and Native North American cosmogonies. What binds these diverse materials is Roffé's use of anaphora. Through anaphora Roffé recalls the process of language building in the face of destruction. When catastrophes level cities, bodies and our loved ones, language too is leveled in our screams. However… poetic techniques can remind us of our subjective capacity to construct language again. They offer the possibility, or at least the hope, that a broken language, and from there the broken body, might also be remembered whole even if it is never to be recuperated."—Anna Deeny

Anna Deeny has translated poetry by Raúl Zurita, Mercedes Roffé, Alejandra Pizarnik, Amanda Berenguer, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Idea Vilariño, Marosa di Giorgio and Malú Urriola. She is the editor and translator of Sky Below, a volume of selected works by Zurita, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. She has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. Deeny is currently writing a book about sound, poetry, and translation.

Mercedes Roffé (Buenos Aires, 1954) is one of Argentina's most important and internationally recognized contemporary poets. Her works include Poemas (1977), El tapiz (published under the heteronym, Ferdinand Oziel, 1983), Cámara baja (1987; 1996), La noche y las palabras (1996; 1998), Definiciones Mayas (1999), Antología poética (2000), Canto errante (2002), Memorial de agravios (2002), La ópera fantasma (2005; 2012), Las linternas flotantes (2009) and the volume of selected works, Milenios caen de su vuelo (2005). Mansión nocturna, a second volume of collected works, is forthcoming from Monte ávila in 2015. Among other distinctions, Roffé was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in poetry (2001) and, more recently, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Center residency fellowship (2012). Roffé lives in New York City and is the founding director of Ediciones Pen Press.