No Budu Please
No Budu Please
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About the Book
No Budu Please emerges in the voice of “an artificial boy in some sort of plastic prairie,” as he zeroes in on desire, spirit, and diversion. A diversion for all those forgotten and on the outskirts, impenetrable. Wingston González has carved out a distinctive way of creating beats with words, a spiritual questioning of godliness, and a space of immersion in a Garifuna history marked by the 1797 expulsion from St. Vincent and subsequent exile to the coast of Central America. One of the most prolific Garifuna writers today, González has built a window into contemporary Black indigeneity in Mesoamerica, but also closed that same window in a sidelong attack on colonialist language and syntax, rewriting Spanish as he goes. Urayoán Noel’s translation moves the ludic experimentation with Spanish into an English that also tears at the colonial heart of Occidental imaginings. Both books insist that colonial fantasies are not to be stomached, that there is no easy way in or out of reality or dream, rather a series of glacial contradictions and bloody yearnings.
Author
Wingston González
Wingston González (Livingston, Guatemala, 1986) is a textual producer. In addition to poetry, he has worked in the fields of dance, visual arts, music, and artistic action. His published work includes Los magos del crepúsculo [y blues otra vez] (Cultura), CafeínaMC: segunda parte, la fiesta y sus habitantes (Catafixia), CafeínaMC: primera parte, la anunciación de la fiesta (Folia), san juan – la esperanza (Literal; Germinal), Miss muñecas vudu (Germinal), Espuma sobre las piedras (Catafixia; in collaboration with choreography by Alejandra Garavito), traslaciones (Cultura; winner of the 2015 Luis Cardoza y Aragón Mesoamerican poetry prize), ¡Hola Gravedad! (hochroth; tr. by Timo Berger into German), and Nuevo Manual de Procedimientos para una Educación Sentimental 1 (YAXS; with illustrations by Bernabé Arévalo).
Translator
Urayoán Noel
Urayoán Noel is the author of 10 books, including Transversal (University of Arizona Press), a New York Public Library Book of the Year, and In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Prize. He is the translator of No Budu Please by Wingston González (UDP) and the editor and translator of Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books), a finalist for the National Translation Award. Noel also translated the concrete poems in Amanda Berenguer’s Materia Prima (UDP), which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. A translator for The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR), Urayoán Noel teaches at New York University and at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.
Praise
In the News
Excerpt
whos coming. fock you. I complain.
I complain. I tend to bite my lip at
parties an not danse. I complain. like
a drug my body dispersed into da
cartilage of da boy dat stares at da
ekcess frum afar. godless lanscapes.
dey are not Ethopian anjels. dey wan
a rasta boy who can sing a myth a star
a glass of gifiti
no budu please