Testimony of circumstances by Rodrigo Lira and translated by Rodrigo Olavarría, Thomas Rothe

This is poetry from Chile.

Testimony of circumstances by Rodrigo Lira translated by Rodrigo Olavarría, Thomas Rothe is published by Cardboard House Press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781945720116E12.

Rodrigo Lira’s Testimony of Circumstances, translated by Rodrigo Olavarría and Thomas Rothe, brings into English a Chilean poet of wild intelligence, satire, fracture, and linguistic disobedience. Lira’s work is difficult to domesticate because it is often built from social noise, literary parody, mental pressure, political context, and a manic awareness of language as a system already contaminated by power. The title sounds almost bureaucratic, but in Lira’s hands testimony becomes unstable, comic, and alarming. Olavarría and Rothe’s translation has to carry not just Spanish into English, but a performance of excess and disturbance. This is not poetry that sits quietly for interpretation. It interrupts. It makes faces. It breaks the furniture of sense-making. Testimony of Circumstances is essential for readers interested in Chilean poetry beyond solemn witness, where critique arrives through speed, humor, and breakdown.

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.