Mirta Rosenberg (1951-2019) is a key poet of the ’80s generation in Argentina. In Interior Landscape, Rosenberg explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective.These poems contemplate the dislocation of the self, posing questions about the relationship between subjectivity, perception, the body, and memory. Rosenberg’s voice is at once autobiographical and critical, displaying the interior landscapes of its experience as well as the complex ways that language forms a fundamental part of that experience. Originally published in Spanish in Argentina in 2012, Interior Landscape is the first book-length translation of Rosenberg’s poetry to be published in English.
Interior Landscape
Mirta Rosenberg
Translated by Yaki Setton, Sergio Waisman
September 2023
About the Author
Mirta Rosenberg (Rosario, 1951 – Buenos Aires, 2019) was an Argentine poet, translator, and editor. She developed a unique style, influenced in part by the British and US poets she translated,that manifests sharp emotional revelations and an intense subjectivity, while reflecting on the linguistic and formal construction of language itself. Her books of poetry include Pasajes (1984), Madam (1988), Teoría sentimental (1994), El arte de perder (1998), El árbol de palabras (2006), El paisaje interior (2012), the anthology El arte de perder y otros poemas (2015), and Cuaderno de oficio (2016). She was a key member of Diario de Poesía (1986 – 2012) and founded the prestigious independent press Bajo la luna in 1990. Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, and individual poems have been translated into English, French, and German. She was awarded, among others, a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship and a Konex Foundation Award.
Praise
When I sit down and start to swim in Mirta Rosenberg’s Interior Landscape, I find myself in a speaking which speaks both to and from the poem as it speaks, and it is so finely responsive and playful, this voice Rosenberg builds into as the time of the poem, that it slows me to its self-subjection, shows me to see again the collapsed gap in myself. Here Rosenberg’s poems reveal the distance between name and thing, between what can be learned from the life lived and the adjustment required to begin again. It is a gift to have these poems, especially the long title poem, so beautifully translated by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman. Let Rosenberg’s poems instruct you, “sit down and mistrust” they tell us, “sit down and open up.”
Lewis Freedman
Mirta Rosenberg envisions an “age whose syntax, deeper, separate and steady,” envelops her whole. And there she dwells, in calm and incantation. All knickknacks and whatnot forbidden / leave your shoes outside / who steps into her house of words?
Kristin Dykstra
Her style is rhythm and her style is a kind of faith (...) What rhythm is this? It is a respiration, and it comes… from a play of lexical and phonetic reiterations… It is a cadence of echoes that lead the way to emotion, to irony, and to a trembling, and which serve to mark the discourse, to break it up… In this kind of dance or balancing act, the words head toward an echo, they come from an echo, they swerve suddenly with slight alterations in sounds or signs…
Olvido García Valdés
About the Translators
Yaki Setton was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. He has published eight books of poetry, including Quirurgia (Paradiso), Niñas (Bajo la luna), Nombres propios (Bajo la luna), La educación musical (Bajo la luna), Lej-Lejá (Bajo la luna), El beso (Bajo la luna) and Langosta (Bajo la luna, 2023). A chapbook English-language version of A Musical Education (translated by Sergio Waisman) was published by Toad Press in 2020. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Sergio Waisman has translated, among others, The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela (Penguin), three books by Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer’s The Regal Lemon Tree (Open Letter Books), and three titles for Oxford’s Library of Latin America. In 2000 he received an NEA Translation Fellowship Award for his work on Piglia’s The Absent City (Duke). He is also the author of Borges and Translation (Bucknell), and the novels Irse (Bajo la luna) and El encargo (Mansalva). He is a Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures at The George Washington University.
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-17-0
Trade Paperback
168 pp, 5.25 x 7 in
Publication Date: September 01 2023
Distribution: Asterism Books