Curtis Bauer’s translation of the book Image of Absence (The Word Works, 2018) by the Mexican poet Jeannette Clariond won the International Latino Book Award for “Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English.” The Latino Book Awards is the largest awarding organization in the USA celebrating achievements in Latino culture and literature.
Lyrical, leaping, mysterious, rigorous, and deft, the poems of Mexican poet Jeannette L. Clariond defy easy analysis. Translator Curtis Bauer faced (in his words) “the seemingly impossible task of how to translate absence, as well as the many sensations absence imprints upon one’s body and psyche,” and succeed he did.
Winner of a Pen/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff Center for the Literary Arts Fellowship, Curtis is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks, the translations editor for The Common, and he currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech University.
Rebecca Gayle Howell notes: “In Image of Absence, Jeannette L. Clariond—the laureate of Mexico’s soul—takes H.D.’s hand and dives head first into the self-same sea which gave us Trilogy, that sea of treacherous silence wherein God’s name lives. With the courage only a mystic dares, Clariond breathes this water into her lungs so she might utter body, its absence; history, her absence; love, her ever-was, speaking sound into silence until it all becomes air. Of course, only the intrepid Curtis Bauer would be the one ready to travel with Clariond into this deep. We needed this book revealed to English; in this time of overwhelming American fear, I needed my chance to share in this uncommon prayer.”
Jean Valentine said, “Reading Image of Absence, how little I know, how deeply at home I feel in Clariond’s intimate strangeness, like finding again a deep friend from another life. I am grateful she offers, in absence, an overnight home place, or a half-hour refuge, waiting for us who wait. I don’t know spanish, so my gratitude for Curtis Bauer’s translation, and for the blessing of his Translator’s Introduction, is boundless.
Jeannette L. Clariond (Chihuahua, Mexico, 1949) grew up between languages, which influenced how she looks at the world, her vision of reality and her poetics. A prolific poet and translator, she has won numerous awards and prizes for her poetry collections, including the Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta for the collection Deserted Memory ; the Premio Nacional de Poesía Gonzalo Rojas for Everything Before Nightfall ; her book Woman Turning Her Back was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Poesía Ramón López Velarde; and Image of Absence was a finalist for the Premio Cope in Peru. In addition to her poetry, Ms. Clariond has translated more than twenty books of poetry by American and European authors, including Charles Wright, Primo Levi, Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Carson. Over the last twenty five years she has translated ten books by the Italian poet Alda Merini. In 2002 Ms. Clariond received a Conaculta Rockefeller Foundation grant for her translation of Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac, and from 2000 to 2006 she worked with the acclaimed critic, Harold Bloom, at Yale University. During this time, she translated important poetic works from the United States and co-edited and subsequently published the anthology, The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of Contemporary North American Poetry; the book was awarded the Latino Book Award’s Best Translation Prize in 2013. Ms. Clariond is a collaborating member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, which has branches in Washington and New York. She recently translated Anne Carson’s book Nox into Spanish.
Curtis Bauer is also the author of three poetry collections, most recently American Selfie (Barrow Street Press).
His translations of the following books are forthcoming: both the novel The Home Reading Program and the book of short stories, Mothers and Dogs, by the Mexican writer Fabio Morábito will be published by OTHER Press; and the memoir Land of Women: An Intimate And Familiar View of The Rural Environment, by the Spanish writer María Sánchez, forthcoming from Trinity University Press.