Poetry in a Bird’s Form
Poesía en forma de pájaro

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Jorge Eduardo Eielson

Translated from the Spanish by Shook
Special Edition for Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Centennial

Tote 01
Visual Poetry
Ginebra / 1950
Bilingual edition

Tote Bag
Printing Method: Screen Printing
Size: 13″w x 14″h x 3″d
Material Type: Cotton
Material Color: Black
Handle Color: Gray
Handle Type: Spun Poly

 PRAISE 

“An influential midcentury Peruvian poet who exiled himself to Europe after publishing the initial works that made him a legend in his home country (...) one of Latin America’s most important wordsmiths.”—World Literature Today

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Jorge Eduardo Eielson was a queer artist and writer, and one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century. He was born in Lima, Peru on April 13, 1924, to a Peruvian mother and Swedish father. While finishing his secondary studies, he met the writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas, who introduced him to Lima’s arts and literary scenes, and whose teaching about Peru’s ancient civilizations Eielson found transformative. In 1945, as a 21-year-old, Eielson won Peru’s National Poetry Prize for his collection Reinos (Kingdoms), and the following year he won the National Theater Prize for his play Maquillaje (Makeup).

In 1949, Eielson received a scholarship from the French government to travel to Paris, where he learned about and joined Grupo MADI. He participated in his first European gallery show at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles alongside several other of the movement’s members. In 1950, thanks to a fellowship from UNESCO, he arrived in Geneva, where he began to write a new type of poetry that experimented considerably with graphic and visual elements. 

In 1951, he moved to Rome, where he decided to stay and work as a correspondent covering art and literature for Latin American newspapers and magazines. In Rome he met his life partner, the artist Michele Mulas, and composed two of his greatest works, Room in Rome and Dark Night of the Body.

In 1963, Eielson began his celebrated series Quipus, in dialogue with the ancient Andean system of accounting, record keeping, and writing. Over the course of his lifetime, Eielson participated in four editions of the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1966, 1972, and 1988. In 1969, he presented a proposal to NASA for a sculpture to be installed on the moon. Despite being received with enthusiasm, its installation was beyond the institution’s capabilities.

In the mid-1970s, he returned to Peru to more deeply study Pre-Columbian art. During this period, the National Institute for Culture published an anthology containing most of his poetry, titled Poesía escrita (Written Poetry). Later that decade, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature and moved to Milan, where he would spend the rest of his life. Eielson was an active member of the avant-garde movements in his native Lima, as well as those in Paris, Rome, and New York.

Following the death of his partner in 2002, Eielson’s health deteriorated significantly, though his spirits lifted when he discovered he had several family members he had not known, including his sister Olivia. The poet died on March 8, 2006, and his ashes were buried alongside his partner’s in a small cemetery in Bari Sardo, Italy.




 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR 

Shook is a poet, translator, and editor who grew up in Mexico City. Their translation for Cardboard House Press of Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s Room in Rome was a finalist for the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation, was shortlisted for the National Translation Award, and received a World Literature Today Nota Bene. Shook’s book-length translations from Spanish include work by Mario Bellatin, Tedi López Mills, Salvador Novo, and Pablo d’Ors, along with Kyn Taniya’s Radio, also published by Cardboard House Press.

Following their undergraduate studies in linguistics, and time spent learning Guerrero Nahuatl in the village of San Agustín Oapan, they began to collaborate with Indigenous Mexican poets, resulting in book-length translations by Isthmus Zapotec poet Víctor Terán and Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez (with Wendy Call), as well as the groundbreaking 2015 anthology Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, co-edited with Terán.

Shook held a Bookshelf Residency at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2021 and served as literary consultant to the Los Angeles Library Foundation’s 2017 Getty PST: LA/LA exhibition and programming, Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A.

Their work has been recognized with a Lannan Residency, the Words Without Borders/Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Global Africa Translation Fellowship from The Africa Institute, among other honors. Shook’s award-winning poetry films, shot on location in countries including Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, and Iraq, have screened at festivals and museums around the world.

Their 2023 translation (with Bryar Bajalan) of A Friend’s Kitchen, by exiled Sudanese poet Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, has been shortlisted for the National Translation Award. Their translations published in 2024 include Conceição Lima’s No Gods Live Here and Farhad Pirbal’s Refugee Number 33,333 (with Pshtiwan Babakr), as well as the anthology Something Missing from This World: Contemporary Yazidi Poetry.