Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

Javier Cercas, himself a venerable author and one of the four writers (along with Grandes, Javier Marías, and Antonio Muñoz Molina) who are credited with “breaking the silence” after the Civil War and the ensuing Franco regime, said Grandes “made the Civil War past present” and called her “The Mirror of Spain.” So how is it that we in the US have hardly heard of an author so celebrated at home and abroad, and a veritable national treasure?… READ MORE

In addition to bringing Honduran poetry to a wider audience, we have felt compelled to translate Bullet-Proof Vest because of Rolando’s Palestinian heritage. His work belongs to an under-studied tradition within Latin American poetry written by descendants of Arab immigrants, like Jorgenrique Adoum (Ecuador), Fayad Jamís (Cuba), and Raúl Gómez Jattin (Colombia), whom we have also translated ourselves or co-translated… READ MORE

Activist poetic translation, like activist poetry, activates our ability to know history through the unique embodied, enfleshed, sensual experience of a poem’s sonority, visuality, and the relationship between the two. This is why we hold poetry readings in solidarity with peoples living through conflict. It doesn’t “do anything” for them in an obvious sense, but it’s important for humanity that we absorb this historical knowledge as embodied experience… READ MORE

Part of the problem of translation and money and recognition as intellectual labor is that translation is private, doesn’t occupy a public space, and that, ontologically, the work itself takes place outside of, between, and together. It has two places where its traces are evident, but where it is never at the same time. In this sense, it is unlocatable… READ MORE