United Left

now that's a title

United Left written by Azerbaijani-born Peruvian poet Álvaro Lasso and translated from Spanish by Kelsi Vanada

United Left. In Vanada’s helpful introduction to the book, she explains that the title is a translation of the name of Peru’s leftist coalition, which “disintegrated in the 80s.” Yet, even knowing that, the title jolts me into imagining what a united left here could look like.

Everything about this bilingual book leads to that kind of proliferation: Reading, I focused in on the author’s specific political history, and I focused out into what it all meant in mine.

I would imagine I was reading the poems in the original and notice the funny disorientation of memory when times are strange and estranging: “Everyone’s celebrating something I don’t remember. At my height I just see skirts tottering around with the pants, stick together like two bricks.” The perkiness of the poems’ imagery kept me wide awake to the Peruvian moment.

But I also read fully appreciating that these are translations. This way, I could see, in another context, instructions for how to reckon with mine, how we have to force ourselves to notice the strangeness hidden inside what is normalized. In reference to writing letters to letters and burning those letters: “We should demand this sport be a requirement, revere the ashes so the wounds never disappear.”

Reason number 101 to love translation: It allows you to read in multiple dimensions at once, which sounds like it should be a headache but is the opposite. Instead, you can become a tennis ball and bounce across languages and times, coming back with more force and grace into right now here at home in your political/lyric head.

Oh hello. And thank you.

PS The book is published by Eulalia Books, whose tagline is: Bringing ex-centric, ecstatic poetries into English for the first time. Um, let’s be best friends, please?