NICARAGUAN POET BLANCA CASTELLÓN “as light as foam . . . as sharp as a cut-throat razor”

  

Earlier this year New Zealand artist, poet & translator Roger Hickin travelled to Nicaragua to take part in the IXth Granada International Poetry Festival. There he met the celebrated Nicaraguan poet Blanca Castellón, an encounter which has resulted in Cactus body, a bilingual chapbook of Castellón’s poems with Hickin’s translations, published in New Zealand by Cold Hub Press.

Castellón’s work has been described by Mexican poet Rogelio Guedea as being “both as light as foam and as sharp as a cut-throat razor,” and like all great Latin American poetry, “a quiet-spoken bird and a broad river.” Fellow Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli writes: “Blanca Castellón’s poetry, in Roger Hickin’s impeccable translation, possesses the great virtues of sassiness and surprise. It is full of trees with secret holes through which she slips into her own unique Wonderland where she is both Alice and the Queen of Hearts pulling an ace from her sleeve with a quiet flourish that turns everything upside down. Cactus Body is a small door which opens on to the world of wonder and beauty of an exceptional poet.” 

Michael Harlow, who is to represent New Zealand at the Nicaragua festival in 2014, regards Castellón as “a poet nicely attuned to the sensibilities of how the heart knows more than all else the head may get up to in making poems. It is the sometimes ex-centric curves of her imagination, and the striking images that show more than they appear to say. It is most often, in this selection, the resonances of the pitch of language that go beyond mere ‘invention’ to the deeper poetic reach of discovery. This is an excellent match of poet and translator: Roger Hickin’s translations are clearly the work of a poet-translator who is nicely attuned to the thought-music of the originals, able to articulate the tensions inherent in a poetry that is willing to take risks with feeling in search of a language, and (always a distinctive mark of a translator wholeheartedly engaged with the language and the culture of the language) he very wisely doesn't get in the way of the originals. As poète interprète, he gives us poems in English that stand strongly in their own right.”

The book’s title is from a poem translated as “Birth”:

In the midst of today’s death / a poem was born // alone /

so alone // its cactus body // stores water / for days of thirst.

CACTUS BODY, Blanca Castellón, with translations from the Spanish

by Roger Hickin, ISBN 978-0-473-26533-5, Cold Hub Press,

softcover chapbook, 44pp, RRP NZ$19.50

The COLD HUB PRESS website is being redesigned at present, but

copies of this title may be ordered by email at coldhub@gmail.com

or from Cold Hub Press, PO Box 156, Lyttelton, 8841