2015 AMÉRICA
América
Risograph print with dry letterpress cover
100 copies
Concept and edition Nicole Cecilia Delgado
Design by Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta
Printed by Keegan Cooke at The Circadian Press, Brooklyn NY
June, 2015
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Poetry book conceived and edited by Nicole Cecilia Delgado. The project is a multi-layered response to an invitation made by ISCP New York to Beta Local, an independent and artist-run space located in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. For 3 months during 2015 Beta Local curated exhibitions and organized events at the gallery space at ISCP, they invited a number of artists-collaborators both from Puerto Rico and New York Based. Nicole’s project became a moment of knowledge exchange, while the book was being edited and designed she took a risograph crash course with Keegan Cooke (The Circadian Press) and was present at the studio during the whole process of manufacturing. This experience was planned so she could return to San Juan and jumpstart a local poetry editorial project using a risograph machine she had recently acquired.
In Nicole’s own words:
“This exercise of re-writing and re-versioning takes upon the challenge posed by an attempt to translate Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America”. It aims to provoke a conversation about the practice of translation in the XXIth Century and proposes a model for poetic translation that:
1) considers that a translation is a text which, although dependent upon the original, lives freely by itself and those literary canons in which both texts transit do not necessarily correspond to each other.
2) implies a practice of active readership, agency, and production of intermediate texts that open up the meanings of an original.
3) validates the intervention of the translator who performs cultural transpositions and makes aesthetic decisions, while acknowledging his or her own name. The translator becomes an individual [a creative and critical subject] who reads, interprets, re-contextualizes, moves, and rewrites a text within a specific context. This particular context can be re-written by an infinite number of different voices, taking into account the infinite, plural experiences, realities, and interpretations that exist across time and space.
4) understands a translation (like a movie script or graffiti mural) is a provisional, pragmatic, and mutable text, doomed to disappear when its temporal validity and aesthetic value expires.
Allen Ginsberg’s “America” refers to a single nation, the United States of America, which polluted by the expansionist values of their society and the Manifest Destiny, monopolizes a name that corresponds to three continents. For this reason, it is desirable to translate “America” from the multiple Americas that constantly re-write and translate themselves under the light of “gringo” expansion into the whole American territory”.
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