Customer Reviews

Mandorla

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Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas -- Issue No. 12, 2009 , eds. Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, Gabriel Bernal Granados. $10

Mandorla might be the most under-recognized venue for new writing in the country (or indeed, all of the Americas). Highlights of Issue No. 12 include Sesshu Foster's "Interview with Juan Fish (Supposedly)," Daniel Borzutsky's translations of Raúl Zurita's 1985 Song for His Disappeared Love, and Jessica Díaz' original poems. Mandorla is unusually comfortable with its bilingualism (in fact, it also includes concrete poetry in Portuguese, from the genre's de facto American home in Brazil), publishing original literature in both English and Spanish, sometimes in translation but seldom with both featured en-face, and though that expectation might heighten its inaccessibility for some, the respect it pays the bilingual literary community makes for an incredibly diverse array of literature. Interestingly, it's also priced in Mexican pesos, and contains several nearly canonical essays of contemporary translation theory and practice, by noted translators like Eliot Weinberger and Kent Johnson, in Spanish only. It's exciting to see a magazine engaged in true dialogue between literary communities, even if slightly delayed, and I think that Mandorla's approach certainly limits the exoticism any literature might be prone to project onto another.

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cover image: "Ball Lightning Strikes County General Hospital," by Arturo Romo-Santillano