Noel, Urayoán: Transversal

Bilingual (University of Arizona Press, paperback)

Publication Date: March 16, 2021

Publisher Marketing: Transversal takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Featuring Noel's bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel's experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis.

Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.