LA TOLTECA ZINE, New Mexico
´SE HABLA ESPAÑOL¨ FALL Issue, 2014
With essays by Edith Grossman, Sandra Cisneros, Indran Amirthanayagam and others. Interviews, new poetry, and more...
I started
writing poetry since I was 11, in my hometown of Leon, Nicaragua. My country is
known for its love of poetry, and its poets, and that was transmitted to me
both at home, and at school. We had a good library and I started learning poems
by heart, poems that I would recite to family and friends, and at school shows.
My parents are
both Nicaraguans, their parents and grandparents too so Spanish has been our
tongue for many generations. But since I grew up in the 70s and English was
already gaining a lot of ground in Nicaragua, I had to take English as a second
language at school. I grew up with it, really, listening to songs by Cat
Stevens, Elton John, ´and groups like Bread or Supertramp, where I would write
the lyrics of the songs down, on paper, to recite them along later when our
friends gathered to listen to them.
It was part of
my academic upbringing, learning a second or third language. In Middle School
we started with English, and by Junior and Senior year the Catholic nuns in my
school had already introduced French. That, combined with the study of literary
greats like Edgar Allan Poe, and Ezra Pound in translation gave me the
curiosity to deepen my knowledge of it, of its culture and its people.
So it was a
given that I had to go to the United States to polish what I had learned at
school, and that’s how I went to Michigan during the winter break of my
HS Sophomore year to spend time going to school with American girls to learn
English, even though I was on vacation at home. My parents had decided early on
that once I was finished with high school I would return to the USA, so I went
to Boston to finish learning English, while I also kept away from the dangers
of the uprising Nicaraguan revolution in 1979.
While Spanish
is the language of my heart, I also have discovered that English is the
language of my reason. Maybe because in poetry words are more precise and more
definite, so you have to be very careful what you choose, also because Spanish
is more musical and poetry is music to the ears. Perhaps because I have an ear
for music, and poetry flows more naturally to me.
It seems to me
that while I relish more writing prose in English than in Spanish, I also enjoy
the challenge of poetry translation from Spanish to English where the real test
is finding a word that not only conveys the same but that also has the same
number of syllables to make up for the nice sound it has in its original
version. So it is not only the meaning but the challenge of sound and music
that affect the poem.
I
have published four books of poetry and a work of fiction. ‘The Lights At My
Temple’ Selected Poems, appeared last year, translated by Fiona Griffin.
MILAGROS TERAN. Winner of the National
Poetry Prize Mariana Sansón,
Nicaragua (2007). Recipient of the Delaware Humanities Forum Award (2005,
2006). Guest Poet at the US Library of Congress (1996, 2004 & 2006).
Poet, essayist, literary critic and translator. Born in León,
Nicaragua, where she was first published at 17 years of age in La
Prensa Literaria. She has a Diplôme de Français, (1987)
Université de Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada. Université Laval, Quebec, Canada. Diploma in
International Relations, (1989). Ministerio del Exterior/, ISRI Managua; BA in
Languages and Literature from George Mason University, Virginia (1996), and an
MA in Latin American Literature from the University of Maryland--College Park
(1998).
Her publications include Las Luces en la
Sien. Managua: Vanguardia, 1993 (poetry); Plaza de los Comunes.
Managua: Anama, NORAD, 2001 (poetry); Sol Lascivo, ANIDE-HIVOS 2007 (poetry);
“El Diario de una poeta" Revista Exégesis (Puerto Rico) (1994)
short story, and Poemas de Una Niña, Managua:
Fondo Editorial Libros para Niños 2010 (poetry), which is a collection of poems
written when she was only 13 years of age. Two such poems were recently acquired by the
Publishing House McGraw Hill in the United States, to appear in 5th
grade text books.
Her new bilingual book, The
Lights at My Temple (Managua: Leteo, 2013) is a selection of her first
poetry collection, 1982-1992.
Her poems have been published and anthologized in Canada, the United
States, México, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile,
Brazil, Spain, France, England, Italy,
Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
She has been translated and published in English, French, Italian
and Portuguese.
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