Translation · Poetry · Cultural Bridge
Voices from Wallmapu · Resistance & Form
Two distinct translation projects at the intersection of indigenous poetic tradition and the Chilean literary canon — bringing forward what has been withheld, in the languages that can hold it.
The Projects
Project I
Mapudungun · Spanish · English
Contemporary Mapuche poetry — living poets writing from within Wallmapu, the ancestral Mapuche territory spanning southern Chile and Argentina. Poems of land, resistance, and continuance that have not yet crossed into English. Translation as act of witness: bringing these voices forward without flattening what is untranslatable in them.
Project II
Spanish · English
Untranslated Chilean women's poetry — writers whose work has not found English translators, erased not by obscurity but by the slow violence of editorial neglect. Poets working in the shadow of Neruda and Mistral who have built bodies of work that the Anglophone literary world has not yet heard.
The ancestral homeland of the Mapuche people — walli, meaning "surrounding," and mapu, meaning "land" or "earth." The name used by the Mapuche for their territory before and beyond the colonial borders that divided it between Chile and Argentina. To use it is to name the land on its own terms.
Under dictatorship, form is never merely aesthetic. The Chilean women poets writing through and after Pinochet discovered what their male counterparts were slower to learn: that the shape of a sentence, the line break, the space held open or closed — these are political acts. Resistance and form are not in tension. They are the same gesture, made in language, under pressure, at cost.
Context
The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in Chile — a people who resisted Spanish colonization for three centuries and whose poets are writing today from within an ongoing struggle for territorial rights, linguistic survival, and cultural continuance. Their poetry is not historical. It is present.
Chilean women's poetry has long been overshadowed by the male canonical figures who dominate the international image of Chilean literature. Gabriela Mistral won the Nobel Prize in 1945 and remains the exception that proves the rule. The women writing alongside and after her — in forms as varied as the lyric, the testimonial, the experimental — have largely remained unread in English.
Translation is not neutral. Every choice of whose voice crosses a border, and in whose language it arrives, is a political act.
These two projects share a governing question: what has been withheld, and what does it cost the literary record to leave it there? The answer in both cases is considerable. The Mapuche poets are writing in Mapudungun and Spanish simultaneously — their bilingualism is itself a form of resistance, a refusal to surrender one language for the survival of the other. The Chilean women poets are writing in a Spanish that carries the full weight of dictatorship, disappearance, exile, and return.