Translating History

Abstract

How can the poetic line translate history? In this article, I trace the methods of translation and transmission that accompanied my writing of an archival poetry collection. Immersed in Mexican Inquisition documents and crypto-Jewish oral histories of the Southwest, the collection interrogates questions of genre, form, empathy, and memory. I argue that historical poetry can foreground the materiality of history, embrace the sensual and strange, and hold at once conflicting narratives of the archive. Poetry’s ability to evade coherence and preserve simultaneities allows the ambiguities of history to surface, mythologies intact. The archival poem brings to bear the rhythms of the past through the language of the present.