Keywords: Poetry, Fiction, Personal Story, Collective History, Latin-American Literature.
ROCA TARPEYA
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Juan Luis Landaeta
English-Spanish
Translated from the Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández
Foreword by Elisa Díaz Castelo
2024
Hardcover | 138 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback | 136 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
I took my children to see the site. They sank their shoes in the paw prints of bears, and followed each other sniffing their asses, like animals do. Because my children and I were there before so many others, I ask you to listen to me. Barbarism doesn’t engender violence, that is a despicable lie, like the slanderous attribution of deadly effects to the magma we saw and photographed behind the hill. Now that I think about it, it actually was a series of hauntings.
— Juan Luis Landaeta
Although the poems included in this volume are full of specific geographical references, these tend to be altered until they achieve a rarefied nature that does not allow us to fully cling to them. Throughout the book Landaeta seems to ask himself how it is possible to narrate a violence that does not correspond to the categories we have historically created to describe it: wars, battles, revolutions. Despite the difficulty that this poses, it becomes necessary to tell it somehow, to integrate it into the symbolic. How can this be done? Landaeta builds a parallel, distorted universe that revolves around a hostile and monumental loss, but without describing it directly—instead he articulates it periphrastically, using a kind of left-handed logic.
- Elisa Díaz Castelo
JUAN LUIS LANDAETA (Caracas, 1988). Writer and visual artist. He has a Master's Degree in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University, and is the author of the books La conocida herencia de las formas and Litoral central. He has given talks and lectures focusing on imagination, and on the integration of literature and fine arts, at Emerson College and Georgetown University. He has been based in New York City since 2013.