Janet McAdams
Photo courtesy of Janet McAdams
Bio
Janet McAdams’ translations of Bolivian poets Paura Rodríguez Leytón, Mónica Velásquez Guzmán, and Melissa Sauma have appeared in such journals as Anomaly, Kestrel, Poesía en Acción, and Poetry. She is the author of a novel, Red Weather, and the poetry collections The Island of Lost Luggage, Feral, and the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After. A bilingual edition of her new and selected poems, Buffalo in Six Directions / Búfalo en seis direcciones, was recently published in Mexico City and in Patagonia. She taught for many years at Kenyon College as the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Spanish of the poetry collection Daughter of Medea by Bolivian poet Mónica Velásquez Guzmán. Daughter of Medea is a book-length poetry sequence that is a feminist retelling of the story of Medea and Jason from the point of view of an imagined daughter who, like Jason and Medea's other children, has been murdered and speaks from the grave. The 40 numbered poems are spoken in the imagined daughter's voice with occasional interjections by Medea herself.
What a joy it has been to discover Bolivia’s rich poetry culture, including Mónica Velásquez Guzmán’s smart, lyrical, and often unsettling work. I translated a few of her poems before discovering her extraordinary book-length poem, Hija de Medea (Daughter of Medea). I knew immediately that I wanted to translate it, that engaging with its pleasures and difficulties was exactly the sort of work I wanted to do as a translator.
I am grateful for the support the NEA, for this affirmation of my own work as a translator and, especially, for its recognition of the significance of Velásquez’s long poem. I am excited to make her work available in English and see it disseminated to a new readership.
I was drawn to Hija de Medea by the poem’s strong voice, its formal sophistication, and the ways it maps the complexities of literary history. It is weird, challenging, lyrically gorgeous, and political in ways that are nuanced and subversive.
About Mónica Velásquez Guzmán
Mónica Velásquez Guzmán, the author of six volumes of poetry and numerous critical studies, is considered one of the most important poets of her generation and perhaps its most important critic. Widely published in Bolivia and little known in the United States, Velásquez Guzmán is a member of the 70/90 generation—the generation of Bolivian poets born in the 1970s who first came into print in the 1990s. Hija de Medea was awarded Bolivia’s most important poetry prize, the Yolanda Bedregal Award.