Rough Song by Blanca Varela and translated by Carlos Lara

This is poetry from Peru.

Rough Song by Blanca Varela translated by Carlos Lara is published by The Song Cave. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2020.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781734035131E12.

Rough Song arrives in this batch as a Peru entry translated from Spanish by Carlos Lara, and its title already opens a useful path into the book. I read it through Blanca Varela’s severe and beautiful lyric intelligence, where roughness is not decoration but a way to keep the poem honest. That does not mean the book needs to be solved through those three ideas, only that they give a reader somewhere to stand before the language begins moving. What I want from a description here is permission: start with the image, the rhythm, the odd pressure of a phrase. Published by The Song Cave, the book widens the library’s sense of what contemporary and modern Spanish-language literature can hold.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.