Overview

Experimental poet and translator Mnica de la Torre's new collection is a document of both the events of 2020 and the process of a poet rethinking artistic practice as she tracks subtle shifts in her experience during multiple global crises. As the world shuts down, Mnica de la Torre's poems become gregarious sites of encounter-homages to connections lost and new bonds forged. Shuttling between lyrical and experimental modes, the poems in Pause the Document challenge linear notions of time by looping the temporalities of dreams, art, the natural world, emotion, and odd encounters under extraordinary circumstances. Richer and more playful than straightforward records, these poems are portals into the intangible dimensions of daily life.

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9781643622460

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Reviews

“This book is a playful, warm, smart and simplemente pinche genial exploration of language via translation –its rhythms, shortcomings, architectures, and possibilities. Mónica de la Torre’s bilingual brain allows no room for platitude or complacency, and reawakens our curiosity for everything it contemplates.” —Valeria Luiselli  “Heads up, false friends! This is the carnival of (mis)translation. Mark the clues 1-5 and merrily go round and round a Spanish poem that is not there. You don’t care. You’re having too much fun. Then time for revelation and analysis: the original poem and the mechanics of the carrousel. Notes on method, on translation in general, the bias of machines, a delightful aside on Cervantes. So many ways of exploring the space between two languages! Lastly, ‘Replay’ documents a playful workshop, i.e. invites you to join in. Don’t hesitate!” —Rosmarie Waldrop  “When received genres of living are no longer sufficient, one can begin to imagine new ways of relating that are as ethically driven as they are delightful. Enter Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition Nineteen, which allows the many-chambered heart of translatory practice to reroute the detritus of techno-nationalism, monolingualism, fixed origins, and originals. Conceptual, comical, deeply personal, moving somewhere between borders, between the serial and the multiple, the paratextual and the metatextual, this book constellates languages to show us how they touch us every day, in every media, in each mode of writing—translation, mistranslation, critical inquiry, autobiography, public performance. Like Eva Hesse’s Repetition Nineteen III, where an array of translucent forms, each a subtle variation of a form and thereby slightly irregular as each of us, we are invited to form as a way of feeling in all its forms. We are reminded that ‘different types of love are possible.’” —Christian Hawkey  “To begin, Mónica de la Torre is dope. Prose, poetry and the annals of workshop as installation cohabit here as an evolving unit of systems that unearth not only the absurd but just how much popular songs might share space with soccer tournaments. De la Torre is just as concerned with the precision of recounting events, the rendering and extraction of new texts informed by Vicuña and Yépez, adventures into Google Translate, the global impact of Siri, and other marvelous wonders via Emojiland as she is with where Spanish has embedded itself in the North American mind. Out of order or from front to back, the discourse is evident, right on the money, and right on time. There is no one way to read Repetition Nineteen. Granted, this wonder may finally be the book I need to finish my book.” —LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs  “Mónica De la Torre’s kinetic, agitated, self-conscious, and super-smart collection warns us, delightfully, ‘let’s not overthink this,’ even as it aspires to many ‘an optical conundrum / psychoactive puzzle.’ The purposefully uneven, sometimes bilingual free verse does not so much occupy territory as sprint back and forth—ties knots, unravels and ravels nets— to tally up its ‘in-between state,’ taking place as it does between Mexico and the U.S., between a heritage of radical experiment and an urgency of saying.” —Stephanie Burt, Academy of American Poets “By presenting the reader with twenty-five different translations of the same poem—which deliberately raises questions about what it means for multiple poems to have ‘sameness,’ or to come from the same ‘source’ poem—de la Torre implicitly argues for the translations as a sort of palimpsest or layering-over.” —Connor Fisher, Colorado Review  “Simply one of the most unique collections of contemporary poetry, Repetition Nineteen is focused on translation as communication, confusion, displacement and opportunity.” —Karla Strand, Ms. Magazine  “Monica de la Torre whisks us along a fantastical journey through translation, Rejecting the assumption that we cannot interact with languages we don’t understand, de la Torre revels in misunderstanding, mistranslation, and mishearing, embracing the delight in valence and equivalence.” —Quinn Gruber, Jacket2 “An essential read for anyone interested in translation.” —Emily Pérez, RHINO “In wit, in range, de la Torre’s gifts are all-too apparent, but her real brilliance is in bringing together seemingly mutually exclusive elements: the poem/the story, the emotive/the theoretical, the amusing/the tragic.” —Dan Fall, The Brooklyn Rail

Author Information

Mnica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City and is based in New York City. She is the author of six books of poetry, of which the most recent, Repetition Nineteen (2020), centers on experimental translation. Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (2017)-a riff on a riff on Kafka's Amerika-and Public Domain (2009). Recent art writing focuses on Cecilia Vicua's Palabrarmas series, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Photostats, and Ulises Carrin's bookworks. She also has co-edited several anthologies, most recently, Women in Concrete Poetry 195979 (2020). She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.

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