{"id":306206,"date":"2017-04-15T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-15T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/04\/15\/tasks-by-victor-rodriguez-nunez-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:22:49","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:22:49","slug":"tasks-by-victor-rodriguez-nunez-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/04\/15\/tasks-by-victor-rodriguez-nunez-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“tasks” by V\u00edctor Rodr\u00edguez N\u00fa\u00f1ez [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

The entry below is by Katrine \u00d8gaard Jensen, who is one of the founding editors of EuropeNow<\/em>,<\/a> a journal of political research, literature, and art at Columbia University. She previously served as editor in chief of the Columbia Journal<\/em> and blog editor at Asymptote<\/em> and Words Without Borders.<\/em><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

tasks<\/em><\/a> by V\u00edctor Rodr\u00edguez N\u00fa\u00f1ez, translated from the Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen (Cuba, co-im-press)<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 38%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: 2%<\/b><\/p>\n

How does an immigrant return to their native country if they\u2019ve never actually left? Cuban poet V\u00edctor Rodr\u00edguez-N\u00fa\u00f1ez asks this timeless (and timely) question through twenty-one sections that make up the long poem tasks<\/em>, translated masterfully into English by Katherine M. Hedeen and published by the exciting co-im-press.<\/p>\n

In terms of describing tasks, I honestly don\u2019t know where to begin\u2014and this seems to be exactly the point: experiences, like Rodr\u00edguez-N\u00fa\u00f1ez\u2019 lines, are without beginning or end, borderless and beyond differentiation:<\/p>\n

beards half a century old
\nscissors dread me
\nI\u2019m hardheaded
\nI\u2019m from another dream of roosters crowing
\nraccoon bandit
\nhygiene of bathrooms both exotic
\nnot so much as a volcano<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

a sooting of flurries
\nI\u2019m a blue mark in the silence
\nfreshly cut grass flamboyant trees
\nwonders of doubt<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

in the mirror there\u2019s someone gazing back
\nransacked by the light
\nan old acquaintance<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014attempted excerpt from the section \u201corigins.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Through the elimination of commas, periods, and uppercase letters (save for proper nouns and the \u201cI\u201d in translation), Rodr\u00edguez-N\u00fa\u00f1ez moves toward a form which he in the book\u2019s introduction calls \u201cedgeless poetry.\u201d Indeed, it is difficult\u2014sometimes impossible\u2014for the reader of tasks to find a point where an idea begins or ends, and it\u2019s exactly within these limitless impossibilities that new meanings and magical images emerge from the text. Rodr\u00edguez-N\u00fa\u00f1ez and Hedeen leave the reader hanging in a compelling cloud of disorientation\u2014guided by question marks as the only sentence-splitting punctuation\u2014throughout the book:<\/p>\n

what does the peasant
\nright in the middle of a furrow
\nweeds no longer relevant
\nfacing the freeway
\nwhere cars hum
\nfor a moment head-raised want to tell you?
\nthat it\u2019s rained and the corn is coming up strong this year?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

that the sun\u2019s yolk
\nhas just burst the horizon
\nstarry with palms and agave flowers?
\nthat the task is hard
\nand you won\u2019t write about all this?
\ntulips glimmer
\nonly proof the sun survives<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

leaves aren\u2019t tame
\nthey turned to glass in the night
\nwhen the workers cut the grass<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014attempted excerpt from the section \u201cindisciplines\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although memory perpetually haunts the quotidian, a comforting regeneration of nature always surrounds the narrator\u2019s experiences. tasks<\/em> deserves to win the Best Translated Book Award 2017 because it reads like a stunning, hopeful requiem\u2014or a cut-up poem crafted from the transcript of a roundtable discussion between Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, Inger Christensen, and The Kinks\u2014presenting an imaginative remix of otherness and eco-poetics in a carefully crafted form where words, like migratory birds, roam freely across borders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[35996,64586,49386,66156,66166,56756,66176,53586,37876],"class_list":["post-306206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-poetry","tag-co-im-press","tag-katherine-hedeen","tag-katrine-ogaard-jensen","tag-tasks","tag-victor-rodriguez-nunez","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306206"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396602,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306206\/revisions\/396602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}