In a letter from March 1986, Susana Thénon writes to her first English translator Renata Treitel that her latest poems “appear to be untranslatable.” Yet Thénon goes on in the letter to encourage the attempt and believes that it can be done. When I found this letter—in Treitel’s archive, along with many other letters between the two women, years after I began translating Thénon’s work myself—I felt both validated and energized. For me, the word “untranslatable” seems a challenge to rise to: of course, some things might be lost in translation, but much will be gained, as well.

This fellowship will support the translation of Susana Thénon’s funny, scathing, and wild unpublished poems from the 1980s. After several years of not writing poetry, her late work marks a significant shift in her poetics. Her encounter with dance in the 1970s opened up a new mode of writing with its movements and idioms. There were fewer restrictions on language itself after Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983. Her father’s death in 1985 relaxed a final tension, and Thénon wrote to Treitel: “my voice changed . . . Simply put, ‘I give myself permission’ to do certain things that never in the world could I have allowed before.” The resulting poems shape shift, rupture, and delight in their own restlessness and creation. Although well-known in some circles today, in 2021 Thénon could still be referred to by the Argentine feminist scholar Sylvia Molloy as “one of the best kept secrets of Argentine literature,” and her work is often only briefly mentioned—when mentioned at all—in Argentine literary history. It is my hope that the publication of these late poems will bring yet another shift, this time greater recognition for Thénon’s innovative poetry.

I am very grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting this translation. The fellowship will offer me the time and space to give these poems the focus and attention they demand. As I translate, I will take a cue from Thénon’s own dream to be close to dance, to put language next to sound and to create poetry that can be listened to “like a work by Stockhausen or John Cage.” These translations will seek not to replace but to coexist next to the originals: two pieces in conversation, opening avenues of engagement with both, depending on who is reading, or listening.

About Susana Thénon 

Susana Thénon (1935–1991) was a poet, translator, and photographer. She published five books of poetry, and while she attained some recognition in her lifetime, has often slipped through the cracks of literary readership in the years since her last book, Ova Completa, was published. She is once again being re-discovered by young readers and Latin American feminists, and recent interest in her work both in Argentina and the U.S. suggests that now is the time for readers to discover anew her groundbreaking, code-switching, rule-exploding poetry that undermines language itself and the very structures of what we think we know.