Translator Wendy Call presents two collections by Mexican Indigenous poets recently translated into English.About this Event
Third Place Books welcomes translator Wendy Call to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her recent translations of by Irma Pineda, a tribute to the collective defiance of Mexico's Indigenous peoples in the face of race- and gender-based violence, and Red Seed: Poems for Luno by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez, an exploration of the traditional relationship between Tutunakú women and the moon.
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Please note: Red Seed: Poems for Luno will be available in-store the night of the event, and is not available on thirdplacebooks.com.
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About Stolen Flower. . .
From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her cornfield. The courts ruled that Ascencio died of natural causes. When journalists investigated, they discovered numerous village girls, as young as twelve, who also had been raped by soldiers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over gender-based violence, oppression of Indigenous communities, and military impunity.
Stolen Flower is Irma Pineda’s powerful sequence of poems memorializing these events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.
About Red Seed: Poems for Luno. . .
Mexican poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez is the first woman to publish a bilingual Tutunakú-Spanish book of poetry; this trilingual chapbook draws from Xlaktsuman papa’/Las hijas del Luno (2021), her debut poetry collection. The subtitle, “Poems for Luno,” uses the masculine version of the Spanish word for moon (the feminine “luna”), referencing the Tutunakú belief that the moon (papa’) is the metaphorical father of all women. Papa’/Luno bestows the gift of their womanhood, as regulator of the menstrual cycle; his monthly arrival is characterized as an amorous affair. This erotic relation is celebrated in Lucas Juárez’s poems, which weave together images of Luno as he appears to the speaker—and to her maternal ancestors—in dreams, quotidian moments, and Tukunakú stories.
Wendy Call (she/her) is author, co-editor, or translator of nine books and two chapbooks, including the annual anthology she co-founded, Best Literary Translations. A recent Fulbright Scholar to Colombia and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa, she teaches creative nonfiction in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program. She lives on Duwamish land in Seattle and Mixtec/Zapotec land in Oaxaca.
About Third Place Books
Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.
Event Venue
Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Avenue Northeast, Seattle, United States
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