Winner of the 2017 Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize, one of the most prestigious awards bestowed for Galician poetry, claus and the scorpion is the fearsome and feral first book of poetry by Lara Dopazo Ruibal to appear in English, translated by the award-winning literary polymath Laura Cesarco Eglin. In poems brimming with achingly vivid and terrifyingly beautiful imagery, Dopazo Ruibal interrogates the shattering responses to trauma and violence as they threaten and intrude upon the precarious "safe haven." claus and the scorpion starts with the resolute calm of the ever-present sea and moves readers to the mercurial forge where fire shapes anew or lays waste, and in this movement, these poems disrupt the desire to return to an idyllic and unattainable past, attacking language's layers and fissures to put pressure on its most enigmatic dualisms: the sublime and the monstrous, the monumental and the mundane, renewal and decay, fragility and strength. Laura Cesarco Eglin translates these poems into stark, mesmerizing English verses, using her nimble eye and deft poet's ear to render Dopazo Ruibal's spare, crystalline original. A singular and spellbinding force majeure, Lara Dopazo Ruibal's claus and the scorpion will make you "stop breathing and break / very slowly / the seams that hold [your] chest together."
Translation is a political practice that denounces and points to the harms of having only one world view. In fact, translation is not about erasing one world to bring out another. On the contrary, translation does away with hierarchy, domination; it fosters the making of worlds that are about pluralities and horizontality. When translating from Galician, a minoritized language, into English, which is perceived as a dominant language, these considerations of subverting hierarchies, binaries, and violence, are especially relevant.
Centered around claus and the scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal, translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin (co•im•press, 2022), this event includes a bilingual reading, a discussion about translation and being translated, and a Q&A.
Lara Dopazo Ruibal was born in Marín (Galicia, Spain). She has a BA in journalism and two MA degrees: one in international cooperation and one in theoretical and practical philosophy. Dopazo Ruibal has published four poetry collections and she is the coeditor and coauthor of the experimental essay volume A través das marxes: Entrelazando feminismos, ruralidades e comúns. Her poetry collection ovella was awarded the Francisco Añón Prize in 2015, and with claus e o alacrán she received the Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize in 2017. Dopazo Ruibal was a resident artist at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome for the academic year 2018–2019. She won the Illa Nova Narrative Award with her short story collection O axolote e outros contos de bestas e auga (Editorial Galaxia, 2020).
Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the translator of claus and the scorpion, longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award in Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst, which was the winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Cesarco Eglin is the author of six collections of poetry, including the chapbooks Between Gone and Leaving—Home and Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath. Her poems and translations (from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician), have appeared in many journals such as Asymptote, Figure 1, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, and many more. Cesarco Eglin is the publisher of Veliz Books and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown.
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