Cardboard House Press is a 501c3 nonprofit organization founded in 2014, dedicated to the creation of Spanish-English bilingual spaces through small-press publishing, community workshops, and bilingual events. We publish Latin American and Spanish poetry in translation, with a focus on innovative contemporary poetry, historical avant-garde, and social poetics. Our work acts as a platform for the exchange of ideas, uplifting new meanings that provoke connection and social action.
So it seems especially poignant and beautiful that here, not a lone translator but rather a team of translators came together around this book in community, to give it a new expression—to respect its ambiguity and hold it up to the “Light and, and, / and light.”
(...) the most moving sections are those written in numbered lists—many of which begin in fact, as if trying to write down what is known (“she was found with a tangle of curls between her fingers”), and dissolve into speculation about what the aunt was going through at the time of her death. The translators move nimbly with the poet between forms.
NAFTA’s translators also demonstrate that their ears are wonderfully attuned to the musicality of the work, even finding resonances that fit the world of the poem but aren’t directly in the original (...) It’s a good reminder that not all is lost in translation, but rather something is often gained.
When Teoría de cuerdas (String Theory) by Karen Villeda was first published in Spanish, it solidified her reputation as one of the most intriguing poetic voices in contemporary Mexican literature.
What emerges is not a forensic reconstruction but a poetic haunting, where the absence speaks louder than any fact, and where language—like grief—returns in broken, circling fragments (...) The fragmented structure also reflects the disjointed nature of memory, how trauma is never linear but emerges in flashes, in echoes, in what is left unsaid. In this respect, one must praise the translation by NAFTA, which captures these intricacies with precision, maintaining the tension between lyricism and conceptual complexity.
By intertwining personal loss with speculative possibilities, this is a book that stretches across dimensions, connecting past, present, and alternate realities. Villeda’s ability to weave these threads together makes the book an intimate yet expansive work, one that lingers long after reading and reverberates across emotional and intellectual registers.
The poems are massive, the statements flurry and flushed, each flip of the page another step in a journey of existential intensity. Villeda’s work feels like the breath itself, a third person exploration of an autobiographical sequence.
As the book unfolds, the reader becomes privy to the aunt’s circumstances: a large, beating heart of a question. That the aunt was found dead, by hanging, is truth. That there is unknown to cause is also truth. There is doubt. There is hope. There is anger. There is impossibility: was the hanging a death by suicide, or was it the result of gender-based violence?
String Theory is a book of mourning, it is a book of cherishing, and it is a book of the resulting fury of need, of needing to know, of pushing forward, into what else but what we are yet to have. It is of connections and relations and relationships with ourselves and with others and the living the dead and being alive and being dead. This book props up our shared gaze and angles it across vast distances of knowing. The results may or may not be clear, but the process is filled with power and beauty. It is the poet’s act to remember and renew, alongside us.
En vez de limitarse a presentar al escrito como un ejemplo más de crítica, la presente edición muestra a ana c. buena con toda la disrupción que su publicación y circulación provoca. Al entrar desde esta radicalidad, abre la oportunidad de conectar a “ana”, la voz poética que lidera los poemas, con las múltiples voces artísticas de resistencia que han germinado en el sur global en años recientes.
Spain´s National Poetry Prize Winner
Longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award
Poetry. Paperback ISBN 978-0-9906601-8-7 Bilingual Edition
We’ve been waiting so long, so expectantly for the poetry of Olvido García Valdés to appear in English translations that convey her signal importance to contemporary poetry in Spain and to international literature. She is one of the great ones. García Valdés taps a mode as essential as the Virgilian pastoral. She pressurizes and opens vents in the syntax, inciting eruptions in logic, emphasizing somatic connections between flesh and world. Characteristically, she braids underdetermined phrasal strands, agencies, points of view, and conceptual and emphatically sensual registers. While absence and negation are key themes in her work, the poems can be sharply funny and they come, against the darkness of our times, to assert a convincing spiritual buoyancy.
With an ear keenly tuned to García Valdés‘ complex music, translator Catherine Hammond often leads with the verb in English, tuning to the Spanish and keeping the agency of the verb open, recreating the stripped down and exigent quality of the original, a quality intensified by the Spanish poet’s tendency to juxtapose fragments without subordinating one to the other. This is an important book. You’ll know that as soon as you begin to read the poems.
—Forrest Gander
PRAISE FOR OLVIDO GARCÍA VALDÉS’ POETRY
“There were those who compared her to Santa Teresa, others who said she was too serious, even sullen, and there were people who swore her pride was chilling to those who met her. I looked for a photo of her. I found one where she appeared with a group of writers, but it was a blurry reproduction. (…) Finally I went to a bookstore in Barcelona to look for one of her books, but they told me her most recent books had sold out, and there was no photo in the only one they had. (…) That night I read ella, los pájaros (‘she, the birds’) in one sitting, a collection of Olvido’s poems that dazzled me in the way only true poetry can. Long after that, when I was in Blanes and far away from Toledo, I read caza nocturna (‘night hunting’), the most recent book by Olvido García Valdés (Ave del Paraíso, 1997) and my admiration for her grew even more, if that were possible.”—ROBERTO BOLAÑO
“To read Olvido García Valdés is to become aware that in the midst of so much absurd speed, something remains.”—EDUARDO MILÁN
“Olvido García Valdés’ elliptical, allusive poetry finds much of its force in omission, and Catherine Hammond’s translations beautifully capture its taut silence and stark power.” —SUSAN HARRIS
“A deep sensual response to nature, its smallest creatures, Blind voles sniffing, and its plants, acacia pianist of the breeze, informs this challenging, painful, and uplifting vision of our condition in this world. Olvido García Valdés may be seen as a more tormented Spanish sister to our own Mary Oliver, sharing a precious, precise attentiveness to what exists. How fortunate that Catherine Hammond has brought the sensitivity of these poems to us in English at last.” —ALEXIS LEVITIN
“Olvido García Valdés is a poet marked by two exceptional traits: the particular truthfulness of everything she says, and the frankness with which she says it. As she herself observes of Patti Smith: her voice comes from deep within her and burns in her throat. In her writing we see the variations of this process: amazement, doubt, strength, abandonment, stubbornness, fragility, anger, affection, clarity, and loss. Though she often speaks of pain, she does so to penetrate the cracks of its mystery, never to slip into pathos. Unflinching like few others, she confronts what most would rather evade.” —JOSÉ MIGUEL ULLÁN
“The spatial otherness constitutes an aesthetic effect of the affective component of Olvido García Valdés’ work, transforming not only the way we think about poetic language in the new millennium, but also disrupting the very surface of the body; that is, the corporeal parameters within which we define ourselves in relationship to others.” —ENRIQUE ÁLVAREZ
Poet, essayist and translator, Olvido García Valdés was born on December 2, 1950 in Asturias, Spain. She holds degrees in Philosophy from the University of Valladolid, and Romance Philology from the University of Oviedo. She resides in Toledo, Spain.
Her poetry collections, except for her most recent Lo solo del animal (2012), have been published together in one volume, Esa polilla que delante de mí revolotea(Poesía reunida 1982-2008). She has translated into the Spanish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry books, and in collaboration, a wide anthology of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. She is also author of the biographical essay, Teresa de Jesús, texts for art catalogs and numerous works of literary reflection. She was co-editor of the literary magazines, Los Infolios and El signo del gorrión. Her poetry has been translated into many languages. She has directed and coordinated several courses, seminars and cycles of contemporary poetry. She was part of the project, Estudios de Poética. Un lugar donde no se miente. Conversación con Olvido García Valdés, by Miguel Marinas, was published in 2014. Among other awards, in 2007 she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Poesía (National Poetry Prize) for her collection Y todos estábamos vivos (And we were all alive).
Catherine Hammond has a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. Poems translated from Olvido García Valdés’ collection And We Were All Alive / Y todos estábamos vivos appear as a chapbook, House Surrounded by Scaffold, from Mid-American Review. Hammond translated Mexican poet, Carmen Boullosa, in a volume of selected poems which was a finalist in Drunken Boat’s book contest. She has also published work from Venezuelan poet, María Auxiliadora Álvarez, and fiction writer, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, from Spain. These translations appear in American Poetry Review, Words without Borders, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Field, and many other national magazines. Hammond’s own poetry has been anthologized in Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry from University of Arizona Press, in MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, and in Yellow Silk from Warner Books. She has three Pushcart nominations. Hammond lives in Sun Lakes, Arizona, with her husband Troy Morrow.