Smooth-Talking Dog by Roberto Castillo Udiarte and translated by Anthony Seidman

This is poetry from Mexico.

Smooth-Talking Dog by Roberto Castillo Udiarte translated by Anthony Seidman is published by HewesHeiser. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781944700089E12.

Roberto Castillo Udiarte’s Smooth-Talking Dog, translated by Anthony Seidman, immediately suggests a poet comfortable with irreverence, creatureliness, and speech that misbehaves. The title has the charm of a joke and the alertness of a threat. A smooth-talking dog is funny until one remembers that poetry often begins when the nonhuman starts speaking back. Coming from Mexican Spanish through HewesHeiser, the book seems to belong to a more unruly, vernacular, performance-adjacent field of contemporary poetry. I would expect a collection invested in voice, swagger, street-level wit, and strange tenderness. Seidman’s translation likely has to preserve not only meaning, but timing. That matters here: a book like this lives or dies by the bark, the joke, the bite.

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.