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Founded in 2014, Cardboard House Press is a space for dialogue between poetics that investigate social, environmental, political, cartographic and linguistic formations. Cardboard House Press publishes poetry in translation in the United States by Latin American and Spanish authors and prints books through diverse processes, including letterpress, block printing, stencil, screenprinting and digital. A series of our publications are made by hand in community workshops. All our books are bilingual.


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Mark

FUDEKARA

Liliana Ponce

Translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea

Designed by Mutandis
Covers letterpress printed with Shut Eye Press

Poetry
Bilingual edition
Chapbook
44 pages
ISBN 978-1-945720-24-6
June 21, 2022







 PRAISE 


The work's evanescence, its ‘not being,' the composition of the void, of the space between the lines, is the art, the mastery of Liliana Ponce in Fudekara, to make present what is felt, the other reality within ‘reality,’ released by and through the brush.

Her admirable reticence is a bolt of world-opening lightning.

—Cecilia Vicuña



In Liliana Ponce's dekatesseral Fudekara, nimbly translated by Michael Martin Shea, all thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime.


—Joyelle McSweeney






 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Liliana Ponce (1950) is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature and writing. She holds a degree in literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and has published five books of poetry in Argentina: Trama continua (Corregidor, 1976), which was awarded Primer Premio del Fondo Nacional de las Artes; Composición (Ultimo Reino, 1984); Teoría de la voz y el sueño (tsé-tsé, 2001); Fudekara (tsé-tsé, 2008); and Paseante y huésped (Club Hem, 2016). Her most recent publications are the chapbook, Poiesis para reunir discursos partidos (Urania, 2019), as well as a volume of selected poems, Mi jardín salvaje (Univ. Eafit, 2020). Her poems, essays, and translations of Japanese poetry and drama have appeared widely in both Argentinian and international literary journals, and her work has been selected for inclusion in numerous anthologies, including Antología de la poesía argentina (Casa de las Américas, 1999), Poesía erótica argentina (Manantial, 2002), Antología de poetas argentinas 1940–1950 (Ediciones del Dock, 2006), and 200 años de poesía argentina (Alfaguara, 2010). In addition to her English translations, her work has been previously translated into French and was included in Voix d´Argentine (Le Temps des cerises, 2009).



 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR 

Michael Martin Shea (1989) is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. His translation of Liliana Ponce’s Diario (Diary) was published as a bilingual chapbook by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018. Additional translations have appeared in Asymptote, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and Witness. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry and hybrid writing, and his own work has appeared in Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Fence, jubilat, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Argentina, he currently lives in Philadelphia, PA, where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as a Series Editor of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology series.



 REVIEWS 


“Ponce finds what is pregnant in recursive, iterative action. She reminds us of how what may seem like mindless repetition might become a pathway to mindfulness. To embody an action over and over allows for endless opportunities to actualize what is at the core of one’s desire.”—Roz Naimi, Zyzzyva



“As Shea implies in the Translator’s Note, this diaristic chapbook of fourteen poems reflect Ponce’s attempts to write herself out of her native language, out of her culture, and, idealistically, out of herself: “I chase an impossible room, to grant the spoken to another ear, another rule.” Ultimately, these meditative prose poems aspire to the condition of the unthought, a script entirely free of alphabetic and hieroglyphic languages (“I was liberating reason to the feeling of the improper, to the unspoken word.”). Even so, Ponce concedes that “Never will I free myself from these moorings.” As one might imagine, it is, finally, the struggle itself, a dance free of gravity and gravitas, that animates these quiet ruminations on the impossible.”—Tyrone Williams, Restless Messengers: Poetry in Review 



“What makes Fudekara’s poems’ repetition so surreal and affecting isn’t Shea’s sharp attention to replicating the rhythm of the poet’s source language alone, but also Ponce’s resistance to time itself. It might even be fair to call Ponce’s poetry a threat to time. A threat to standards, understanding, accessibility, and order.”—Paul Cunningham, Action Books