Poet Miguel Avero and translator Jona Colson, who collaborated on the Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s upcoming poetry collection Aguas/Waters, have never met in person. They’ve spoken on a couple video calls, but mostly, they message back and forth about their translations over WhatsApp.
Through text and voice messages, the writers have resolved translation questions big and small. Once, Avero recounts, speaking in Spanish to City Paper from his home in Montevideo, Uruguay, he was charmed to find that Colson had translated his use of the word vaquero to cowboy. That translation would be perfectly accurate for plenty of the Spanish-speaking world, but in Uruguay, vaquero is the go-to word for jeans.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to find the best fit for a word,” Avero says. “You end up sacrificing something one way or another. Maybe you lose a bit of meaning, but you gain in musicality, or you’re more literal, but it sounds awful. It’s an interesting game, and I’m happy to leave it in Jona’s hands, because at this point, I trust him completely.”
That trust has been more than a decade in the making. Colson, a poet, translator, and co-president of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, who lives in Dupont Circle, was first introduced to Avero’s work in 2013 by poet Jesse Lee Kercheval. At the time, Kercheval was putting together an anthology of Uruguayan poetry by pairing emerging poets with emerging translators. Colson, then 34, was assigned a few poems by Avero, who was in his 20s.
“I love the way that certain poets, specifically Latin American poets, work with elements like fire or water, and you see that coming through in Miguel,” Colson tells City Paper about his first time reading Avero. “His poems were really interesting. They were very different from what I was used to reading.”
Colson fulfilled his translation quota for the anthology, which was published in 2016 under the title América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets, but he didn’t want the work to stop there. He asked Avero if he had more poems he’d like translated; Avero sent him everything he had. That included two poetry collections: 2011’s Arca de aserrín (sawdust ark) and 2016’s La pieza (the bedroom, in Uruguayan slang, though Colson discloses that he initially brought the title into English as “The Piece,” the formally correct translation).
Aguas/Waters, which will be published on May 16, is a selection of work from those two collections, divided into two sections corresponding to each. Aguas/Waters places Avero’s original poems next to Colson’s translations, which are stunning in their ability to bring the melody and magical realism of Avero’s Uruguayan Spanish into coherent English-language poems.
The collection’s title is borrowed from a poem initially published in Arca de aserrín that imagines “water in the ink of the verses/ that will never be written” and “water in the troubled river/ of our inner peace,” but it also doubles as a thesis statement for the entire collection. Water is an anchor for the majority of poems in Aguas, a physical and metaphorical element that Avero returns to again and again. His poems journey through rainstorms, oceans, and leaky ceilings. “In every man the rain/ weaves its argument,” he states plainly at the close of “Argument.”
Avero’s constant references to water in his poetry “have a lot to do with memory,” he says. “Rain has this ability to transport me to a rainy day from my past. Like, right now, I’m sitting here on this rainy afternoon, but I’m thinking of other afternoons where the sky was the same color, maybe from my childhood. Water always has a poetic memory of sorts for me.”
Though Avero has never been to Washington, his abstractions of gray skies, volatile weather, and crowded apartment buildings won’t be all that foreign to D.C. readers. Colson is excited for the “cross-capital communication” that the publication of Aguas/Waters will mark, as Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay. Avero, for his part, says the translation will open up “an abyss of possibility” for him.
“A diversity of people will now get to read what I’ve written, deeply intimate, personal things that I let go of a long time ago,” Avero says, noting that Uruguay is small, and his readership is modest. “Now, my poems will pass through the eyes, and the minds, and maybe the hearts, of people very different from me, and I really want to know what that sparks.”
He’ll get the chance to find out this July, when he flies from Montevideo to D.C. to celebrate the publication of Aguas/Waters alongside Colson. Not only will the longtime collaborators get to meet face-to-face for the first time, they’ll also have the chance to speak with audiences about their creative process at readings taking place at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue NW location, Baltimore’s The Ivy, and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda.
Aguas/Waters will be the first-ever translation published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a local nonprofit small press that has been around since 1975. The book’s publication will kick off the publishing house’s commitment to releasing a work in translation every two years, at least. Colson and his team are especially eager to translate work originally written in languages that are spoken frequently around the DMV, including Spanish, Vietnamese, Amharic, West African French, and Haitian Creole.
“We are a wonderful capital for all these diverse voices,” Colson says. “So let’s hear them through translation.”
Aguas/Waters comes out on May 16. Readings are scheduled for 7 p.m. on July 12 at Politics and Prose; 5 p.m. on July 13 at The Ivy; and 4 p.m. on July 14 at the Writer’s Center. washingtonwriters.org.