Eleonora Requena’s poetry is fundamental for any reader interested in Latin American poetry. Now, thanks to this magnificent translation by Guillermo Parra, it will also be available for English-speaking readers who might encounter her work. Outside Texts names silence with subtlety and translates the edge of verbs in constant unfolding. It conjugates the experience of the outside along with the most intimate aspects of the self, bringing us closer to the absolute being of the word, a being named from within to give the world meaning through tenderness. Requena writes poetry of the deepest honesty, an honesty made into words that make us live and resist.

We all coincided, from different points of appreciation, on the high quality of language the author manifested, in the fragments from her prize-winning and still unpublished book [mandados] that appeared in these pages. Her poetry, we agreed, is the retelling of a journey, one she undertakes in obedience to a mandate. The order begins in an “underworld of complex branches,” according to her own words, whose severity allows no delay or distraction. She admits this with no reservations when she says: “I almost obeyed as I’m alive.” Eleonora agrees it’s a question of family, “they;” ghosts and beings, whose evolutions are understood within four walls. Days at home are ripped sheets of paper, that revolve around themselves, within a paralyzed atmosphere, continuously approaching us and distancing itself with no explanation. Language recounts, recounts by trade, with the need to seek and leave a record of what has been found, whether by chance or persistence.