11

Carlos Soto Román

Translated by Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Patrick Greaney, Robin Myers

Thomas Rothe, Editor, Translator

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $22 $19.80

September 2023
Read an excerpt

First, the legs; then, the genitals; then, the heart.

In that order, they fired the machine guns.

 

***

 

EXTERMINATED

LIKE RATS

  

*** 

 

…in the beginning, when you start, you cry and try to hide, so that nobody notices you. Then, you feel shame, a knot forms in your throat but now you can tolerate the weeping. And then, […] you get used to it. And in the end, you don’t even feel what you’re doing… 

  

***

 

a message from the SUPREME GOVERNMENT to the

                                                                the SUPREME GOVERNMENT is working rapidly on the

         spreading subversive propaganda against the SUPREME GOVERNMENT

                          and threatening to the SUPREME GOVERNMENT will suffer the penalties

                                  considering the urgency for the SUPREME GOVERNMENT to have

                                                                        the SUPREME GOVERNMENT to the workers of the country:

                                         regarding the measures the SUPREME GOVERNMENT has adopted

                                                   the SUPREME GOVERNMENT carefully analyzed

                                          the SUPREME GOVERNMENT is fully aware

                                          the SUPREME GOVERNMENT has prepared

  

***

 

all I’ve seen all I’ve heard all in silence forever until the grave 

11 is the flight recorder of Chile’s memory.

Gonzalo Córdoba Saavedra

The title of this book evokes the “other” September 11: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version into English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.

About the Author

Carlos Soto Román (Valparaíso, 1977) is a poet, translator, and pharmacist. He holds an M.A. in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Naropa. While living in the United States, he was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets Collective, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and curated the anthology of US poetry Elective Affinities. He has participated in numerous readings, symposia, talks, and festivals in Chile, the US, and Europe. In the United States he has published Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF), The Exit Strategy (Belladonna), Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press), Bluff (Commune Editions), and Common Sense (Make Now Press). In the UK he has published Nature of Objects (Pamenar Press), and in Chile he has published La Marcha de los Quiltros, Haikú Minero, Cambio y Fuera, 11, Densidad (d=m/V), and Antuco, the latter in collaboration with Carlos Cardani Parra. He translated the first Spanish-language version of Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff. His work can be found in Apiary, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Crux Desperationis, The American Poetry Review, Mandorla, MAKE Magazine, Pennsound, Tiny Mag, Aufgabe, Jacket2, The Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, Lyrikline, World Literature Today, A Perfect Vacuum, Periodicities, Latin American Literature Today, and Pensamiento Político. His book 11 was awarded the 2018 Municipal Poetry Prize in Santiago, Chile.

Praise

Carlos Soto Román’s work teaches us that history doesn’t just happen, but is always happening to us. Language, when touched by the questions of the present, is revived, exploding in every direction, especially toward the future. Writing becomes reading. And aesthetics, a political statement. This book tackles the most ferocious challenge for any writer: to produce reality. Another reality.

Cristina Rivera Garza

Like so much of history, nothing is ever entirely revealed and erased or in Carlos Soto Roman’s 11. Using fragments from documentaries, interviews, government reports and archives (among other sources), Soto Roman leads us through the violent overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, the Pinochet dictatorship and the ruins of lives and language left in their wake. These poems reverberate with lists, blanks and the language of government bureaucracy. Despite the fractured narratives (“First the legs, then the sexual organs, then the heart”) these poems never fail to offer an emotional experience while forcing readers to confront questions such as how should we mourn, how should we commemorate and how can poetry serve in the wake of atrocity.

Susan Briante

In 11, Soto Román uses appropriation in order to exaggerate or intensify censorship, in a negative poetics that in no way falls into the trap of nihilism or negativism itself… the interface or conceptualist machine that he builds employs various tactics of resistance in order to make absences and silences speak… In 11, the reality of the erased, crossed out, and the altered page is indeed the fiction of itself. We do not confront the end of poetry here; however, the attentive reader of 11 does indeed witness an impressive, apocalyptic gesture, even within the storied tradition of experimental and radical Chilean poetry.

Scott Weintraub, Asymptote

11 is the flight recorder of Chile’s memory.

Gonzalo Córdoba Saavedra

This book of poetry, with its form inevitably alluding to the textual, fosters estrangement and breaks up meaning among registers: here, I read an order, a list of aliases used by torturers, a technical procedure to punish a body, but I’m also reading something else. 11 offers a vehicle for these materials, aligned with a historical sequence that is not necessarily chronological.

Teresa Cabrera (Pesapalabra, No.3)

About the Translators

Alexis Almeida is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse) and most recently the translator of Dalia Rosetti’s Dreams and Nightmares (Les Figues) and co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Her poems, prose, translations, and interviews have recently appeared in FENCE, Oversound, BOMB, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and edits 18 Owls Press. 

Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Action Books Blog, Propagule, ergot, Self Fuck, New South, Burning House Press, Alwayscrashing, and elsewhere. He’s the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry, most recently Total Darkness Means No Notifications (Anstruther Press) and Anatomizing Uncanny Alley (Self Fuck). His full-length collection of poetry, You Alive Home Yet? is available from Schism Neuronics and he recently released a splatterpunk novel Blood Pudding (World Castle Publishing) and a post-apocalyptic novella The Mother of Flowers (The Wild Rose Press). Daniel’s first collection of short stories, Funeralopolis (Orbis Tertius Press), and existential horror novel Lord of Chaos (Erratum Press) will be published in 2023. He is also co-founder of OOMPH!, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry and prose in translation. He can be reached @666ICECREAM.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.  His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures and cultures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec (Ugly Duckling) and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard (Ugly Duckling), as well as co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling) and Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace / Lo común (Cardboard House). Involved in various collaborative editorial endeavors, most recently she co-edited Ruge el bosque: ecopoesía del cono sur (Caleta Olivia), the first volume in a series of multilingual ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. Currently a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.

Jèssica Pujol Duran (Barcelona, 1982) is a poet, translator and researcher, currently working as Assistant Professor at the University of Santiago de Chile. She writes and translates in Catalan, English and Spanish, and has three chapbooks in English, Now Worry (Department, 2012), Every Bit of Light (Oystercatcher Press, 2012) and Mare (Carnaval Press, 2018); two books in Catalan, El país pintat (Pont del petroli, 2015) and ninó, (Pont del petroli, 2019), and two in Spanish, Entrar es tan difícil salir (Veer Books, 2016), with translations by William Rowe, and El campo envolvente (LP5 Editora, 2021). She is the editor of the magazine Alba Londres (www.albalondres.com). 

Patrick Greaney is Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the co-editor and translator of An Austrian Avant-Garde (Les Figues Press) and the author of Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin and Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (both from University of Minnesota Press).

Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her latest and forthcoming translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books), The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada (Deep Vellum Publishing), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press). A 2023 NEA Translation Fellow, she was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. She lives in Mexico City.

About the Contributors

Thomas Rothe is a translator and scholar of Latin American and Caribbean literatures. His research focuses on the history of translation, print and popular culture, and critical discourses throughout the region. He has translated the poetry of Jaime Huenún, Rodrigo Lira, Emma Villazón, and Julieta Marchant, and co-translated into Spanish Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously and Claire of the Sea Light. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow (Fondecyt/ANID), associated with the Universidad Católica de Temuco, and lectures at several universities in Chile.  

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-97-8
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 200 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: September 01 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books (US), Inpress Books (UK)