Seams/Costuras
Seams/Costuras by Cristina Rivera Garza and Jessica Sequeira
Illustrated by Ángela Lavilla Cañedo
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All letterpressed, 8 pages, 2 illustrations, run of 40, £9+p&p
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Girasol #4, Cuchillo/Knife by Paula Abramo, Lucy Greaves and Etta Dun, and Girasol #5, Seams/Costuras by Cristina Rivera Garza and Jessica Sequeira, are re-versionings of poems from Juana Adcock’s collection Manca [One-Handed] (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2014), which confronts the violence of contemporary Mexico with a poetic gambit: cutting off one’s own hand.
Adcock’s Manca ghosts these texts but is never legible as such. Cuchillo and Seams are part of the experimental translation collaboration between Scottish and Mexican poets and translators, One-Handed Translation Anthology, edited by Juana Adcock and Raul Bery. Each text in the anthology is really at least 3 texts: one poem translated using the literalism of Google Translate from a poem in Manca, and the second a translation of that translation, again using experimental corpus-based translation methods. Adcock writes in Glasgow Review of Books (2015), ‘The source texts […] have been lost, decaying and falling away like a perishable item cast in plaster.’
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