UNSILENCED TEXTS

Gregory Randall’s award winning memoir of life in Cuba, “Estar Allí Entonces / To Have Been There Then,” originally published in Uruguay to great acclaim in 2010. (trans. Margaret Randall)

“Gregory Randall has done it: written a captivating, ethically humane, and inspirational memoir of growing up in revolutionary Cuba as a child of exiled political activists. He is able to tell forthright yet loving stories of his engaged life with multiple fathers, escaping the 1968 military crackdown in Mexico as a seven year-old in charge of his younger siblings, forging friendships in Cuban boarding schools, and living his adolescence as an intellectual and political coming-of-age banquet among artists and revolutionaries from across the continent. He sees dogma and cant yet remains deeply committed to the vision of a liberated space and new women and men. Read this powerful book and be stirred anew to live fully in harmony with your values.” – Bernardine Dohrn 

“Gregory Randall grew up in revolutionary Cuba. He left in 1983, and later he and his wife Laura relocated to Uruguay and Gregory established himself within the academic world there. Revolutionary Cuba’s literacy campaign in 1960-61, which sent young people into the mountains during a period that included the Bay of Pigs invasion, is generally recognized. Cuba’s far flung medical assistance in situations like the recent Haitian earthquake is also well-known. This book explores the more comprehensive Cuban effort to create what the Zapatistas call un otro mundo, another world. I know of no other book that so richly provides an empathetic view of the twentieth-century socialist project from both within and without. — Staughton Lynd

“To Have Been There Then is an extraordinary book. Gregory Randall recreates scenes from a revolutionary childhood and youth in Mexico and Cuba during  the 1960s and 70s with brilliant vividness that brings an adult’s wisdom to the child’s perspective. He evokes the spirit of revolutionary consciousness of the era, when Cuba’s radical experimentation and commitment to building a new world intersected with revolutionary dreams and movements throughout Latin America. Randall’s childhood was peopled with artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries from throughout the continent who shared a deep belief in the possibility for radical social change. Cuba’s revolutionary history is told here with verve and drama, through personal detail of a child and young man coming of age in truly historic circumstances.” – Aviva Chomsky, author of The Cuban Revolution, co-editor of The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

“Here is the perfect book for this time of change in US-Cuban relations, and when a new generation in the United States has embraced the idea and goals of socialism and human solidarity. Gregory Randall’s exquisite coming of age story, set in Cuba during the second decade of the Cuban Revolution, is unflinchingly truthful and compassionate.” – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian and author most recently of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

“Lo Que Les Dijo El Licantropo / What the Werewolf Told Them,” a dual language edition of Queer Cuban poet Chely Lima’s striking poetry, featuring a cover photo from the poet/artist. (trans. Margaret Randall)

“Here is the strength of poetry for the world. Is it possible this book exists? I cannot be the only one who realizes I have been waiting all my life to read Chely Lima! The poet driving their own body in the trunk through the vast vulnerable fields of becoming human the way they want to become human in an inflexible world. Many thanks to Margaret Randall for these beautiful translations of one of the most brilliant books in many years! Chely Lima is here! Everyone tell everyone!” – CAConrad

Chely Lima’s poetry is exquisite and shines with a divinity.  Dreamy, surreal and at other times pragmatic in their linguistic abilities, his poems defy any simplistic categorization.  In fact, What the Werewolf Told Them begs of the reader to be read and read again. It is the transformative and mutability of the word that Chely captures in his work.  In essence, he is a kaleidoscopic writer. Ever shifting. Ever evolving.  His poems are songs of liberation, of journey.  His words are signal-flares crafted into poems that tenderly and heartbreakingly convey the gender-transgressive voice and story of the author.  Chely’s poetry is much like the stars, mythic but always startlingly real. Éste libro brilla con una cruda y estupenda tenacidad.” – Jessica Helen Lopez, City of ABQ Poet Laureate, Emeritus.

These are poems of astonishing courage and compelling craft. Their language sizzles on the page. The poet’s familiarity with history and his penchant for plumbing its most significant myths imbue these texts with a special richness. The myths come from the Greeks, Hindus, Germanic fairy tales, those drum beats brought to the New World by Africans during the ravages of the Middle Passage, and stories from indigenous America. Chely also creates some myths of his own.

“These poems are also gender-transgressive, revealing a personal journey as painful as it has been liberating. And it is a complicated journey. We cannot say the poet is only a man or that he was once a woman; such binary notions are themselves being challenged here. Body parts and the uses to which they are assigned in our inadequate society are routed from their comfort zones, made to look at themselves in a succession of mirrors and confronted head on. Chely refuses to play by society’s hypocritical rules—in his life or work.

“The poem called “Recognition” begins: “I am digging up my face, / which is to say all the faces of my tribe. / With difficulty I haul them from obscurity / and hang them from the insulting stakes / marking each of their graves, my grave.” And the poem ends: “I am rebuilding with one clenched fist / in my pocket. Rebuilding my tribe, / my face unmasked for the first time.” Chely’s power lies in being willing to take the reader to the depths of his agony while at the same time permitting us to glimpse a future, a way out of suffocation that is woven of his ability to imagine a world in which acceptance and dignity bloom.” – Margaret Randall, from the Introduction

“Flower World Variations,” an expanded edition of the 1983 collaboration between poet Jerome Rothenberg and groundbreaking digital artist Harold Cohen

The process of translation is here re-imagined as a new wilderness by Jerome Rothenberg and Harold Cohen, in a multilayered composition of poems and computer generated drawings for the “human/other-than-human worlds” originally composed by the Yaqui poets of Arizona. An oral masterpiece, rendered masterfully. A moment to rejoice!” – Cecilia Vicuña

 

15 Flower World Variations. A revised & expanded version of Jerome Rothenberg’s variations on a set of traditional Yaqui Indian Deer Dance songs, with computer-generated drawings by Harold Cohen, one of our truly great pioneer computer artists. Originally published in a modest 1984 offset edition the book is newly enhanced in quality and features an updated introduction by Rothenberg and an excerpt from Cohen’s writings on the nature of mark-making and meaning/metaphor over a wide range of times and cultures. As such it serves also as a memorial and tribute to Harold Cohen, whose recent passing it helps to commemorate.

“La Comandante Maya: Rita Valdivia; On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Death in Bolivia of Ernesto Che Guevara” (trans. Margaret Randall)

Who was Rita Valdivia? In October 2017, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia, occasion for tributes throughout the world. Margaret Randall defies the absence of women’s stories in Che’s myth, bringing us the brilliant poetry and powerful personal history of this woman who died in combat just after her 23rd birthday. In a pre-feminist era and before she was 17, Rita named and escaped domestic violence. Not yet 20, she wrote poems that continue to astonish. At 22 she assumed a leadership role in Bolivia’s Army of National Liberation (ELN), the fighting force that took up the struggle for freedom where Che left off. La Comandante Maya reveals the life and legacy of one of the many women involved in an effort that, up to now, has publicized only a token female presence. Read testimonies of Rita Valdivia’s remarkable life by those who knew her best, and be astonished by her unique and lyrical poetry in bilingual format.

The first title in the series is an Arabic to English dual-language translation of Palestinian artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh’s 2008 collection, “Instructions Within,” translated by Mona Kareem, with Jonathan Wright and Mona Zaki, with additional English translation supervision by Ammiel Alcalay, Pierre Joris, and Lynne DeSilva-Johnson.  All proceeds will go to support the fight against Fayadh’s ongoing sentence and imprisonment in Saudi Arabia.

Je ne connaissais pas Ashraf Fayadh. Mais cette sentence nous renseigne sur sa poésie, sur sa force, sur sa violence. Les poètes sont des insurgés, porteurs de feu, compagnons de la vérité et de l’évidence. Ils sont la lumière qui éteint les ténèbres et donne les mots aux choses qui meurent de ne pas être dites. Ils sont fragiles et forts à la fois. Ils ne possèdent que leur souffle et leur âme qui résistent. On peut les frapper, les fouetter, les jeter au fond d’un puits, les enterrer vivants, leur voix continue de s’élever et réveille le monde.” – Tahar Ben Jelloun, for Le Point

[“I have not known Ashraf Fayadh, but this sentence teaches us all we need to know about his poetry — about his strength, about his violence. Poets are insurgents, carriers of fire, companions of truth and of evidence. They are the light which goes out into the darkness and gives words to things which die from not having been said. They are fragile and strong at the same time. They possess only their breath, their souls, who resist. We can hit them, whip when, throw them to the bottom of a well, bury them alive, but their voices continue to rise, and wake up the world”. – trans. Lynne DeSilva-Johnson ]