MARIGLORIA PALMA

I’ve been researching and translating the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma (c. 1920-1994) since 2015. I won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize in Translation for a small portfolio of her poems, and I’ve published others with small axe salon, Asteri(x) Journal and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. I wrote about her impact on my own translation practice for the New York Times Magazine and have spoken at conferences and convened seminars about her work at the University of Southern California (watch the recording here), the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, and Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her many books are currently out of print, but I am at work on a bilingual edition of selected poems from her most prolific period in the 1960s and 1970s. Here I am with Poets for Puerto Rico at the Bronx Museum in 2018 reading my translation of her 1976 poem “Amigo, Esto Que Duele.”

In her judge's citation for the 2016 Gulf Coast prize, Idra Novey wrote:

The translation of Marigloria Palma's radical, radiant poems into English is long overdue, and Carina del Valle Schorske's English versions are as fierce and lyrical as the original poems. Palma writes of the parrots making their way to Puerto Rico from the gardens of the White House, of the bullet that is her island, lodged in her chest. Every one of the poems in this collection took my breath away, and del Valle Schorske's translations capture the verve and vitality of Palma's voice with extraordinary precision.

NICOLE CECILIA DELGADO

I am involved in an ongoing mutual translation practice with Nicole Cecilia Delgado. In 2020, I translated her long essay about anti-establishment bookmaking in Latin America—“A Mano / By Hand”—for Ugly Duckling Presse. Earlier in 2020, she translated and made a bilingual broadside of my poem “Now and Then / De vez en cuando” at her workshop, La Impresora. In 2019, I translated a short selection of her poems, “Días Naturales / Natural Days” for the Scottish publisher 2hb, and she translated the prologue I wrote for Mara Pastor’s book Falsa heladería.

PUERTO RICO EN MI CORAZÓN

Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019) is a bilingual anthology based on a special collection of handmade letterpress broadsides by contemporary Puerto Rican poets. I co-edited and worked as a translator on this project alongside Raquel Salas Rivera, Ricardo Maldonado, and Erica Mena. 100% of broadside sales went directly to Taller Salud to assist Puerto Rico in recovering from Hurricane Maria. The poems, many of which were written in direct response to this disaster, look beyond the headlines to undertake reparative work across languages and oceans. Puerto Rico en mi corazón is one of the most comprehensive collections of contemporary Puerto Rican poets in both English and Spanish. Buy it here.