Translator Wendy Call appears in-person at Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle) with the poets Mikeas Sánchez and Irma Pineda, appearing virtually, for a quadrilingual reading. The poets will read from their recently released collections, How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems (Milkweed Editions) and Nostalgia Doesn't Flow Away the Riverwater (Deep Vellum), both of which were translated from Spanish into English by Wendy.
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love.
Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.
Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater is a trilingual collection by one of the most prominent Indigenous poets in Latin America: Irma Pineda. The book consists of 36 persona poems that tell a story of separation and displacement in two fictionalized voices: a person who has migrated, without papers, to the United States for work, and that person’s partner who waits at home, in the poet’s hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca.
Mikeas Sánchez is the author of How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems. She is one of the most important poets of the Indigenous Americas, working in Zoque, a language spoken in southern Mexico. She is the only woman to have ever published a book of poetry in that language. Her six volumes of poetry are all bilingual Spanish-Zoque. Sánchez’s work has been translated into Bangla, Catalan, English, German, Italian, Maya, Mixe, and Portuguese. In Chiapas, Mexico, she was awarded first place in the “Y el Bolóm dice . . .” Prize for Fiction as well as the Pat O’tan Prize for Indigenous Poetry. Sánchez is a radio producer, translator, community health promoter, and defender of Zoque lands. She lives in Ajway, Chiapas.
Irma Pineda is a Binnizá poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She is the award-winning author of twelve books of bilingual (Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec) poetry. A faculty member at Mexico’s National Teachers’ University, she served as Vice-President of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2020 through 2022. Her first English-language collection, In the Belly of Night and Other Poems, appeared in 2022. More than one hundred of her poems have appeared in U.S. literary journals—including Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, and Two Lines—in Wendy Call’s English translations. Together, Pineda and Call won the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize for Translation, for trilingual poems published in Poetry. She lives in her hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico.
Wendy Call (she/ella) translated Irma Pineda’s In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (2022) and co-translated Mikeas Sánchez's How to be Good Savage and Other Poems (2023). She is author of the award-winning book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (2011) and co-editor of two anthologies: Telling True Stories (2007) and Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024). A 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and 2018-2019 Fulbright scholar in Colombia, she lives in Seattle and Oaxaca.