In the roughly two decades since Víctor Rodríguez Núñez began writing the antinationalist salvo actas de medianoche and Katherine M. Hedeen began its translation, both have published numerous award-winning works and gained international recognition for their poetry and translations. But despite their acclaim and the widespread success of the poem in the Spanish-speaking world through various prizes and publications (Valladolid, Soria, La Habana), traditional English-language publishers resisted considering the poem and its defiance of preconceived notions of Cuban and Latin American poetry—until this April, when the book-length poem, midnight minutes, was published in full with Action Books.
Spanning over 2000 lines, midnight minutes challenges the formation of the traditional poem on the page and the formation of borders of all kinds. Rodríguez Núñez reinvents the sonnet as it curves between the rural towns of his life, from Cayama, Cuba, to Gambier, Ohio, where he lives together with Hedeen, embracing the night as homeland in “one long, dark breath.” Hailed as one of his most influential works in the Spanish-speaking world, actas de medianoche marked a new, experimental turn in both Rodríguez Núñez’s poetics and Latin American poetry overall, now extending into the English for the first time in full with midnight minutes.
I interviewed Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez about the significance of the translation’s publication today, the contemporary long poem and sonnet in Spanish and in English, their influences from Cesár Vallejo to Pierre Joris’ translations of Paul Celan, and how Hedeen and Rodríguez Núñez transform the poetic subject and the object of desire.
The following dialogue has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Pazen (SP): You both have spoken about how, despite the impact of actas de medianoche in the Spanish-speaking world since its initial publication, presses in the United States were overwhelmingly resistant to publishing the English translation, midnight minutes. This was often because of how it defies preconceived ideas of Latin American, and specifically Cuban, poetry. Why do you think right now is finally when these translations are being published?
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (VRN): Let’s talk a bit about why there was resistance. There is a problem with long poems. Many magazines don’t publish them. Each canto in midnight minutes has fourteen stanzas. The book has more than two thousand lines. And it’s not a book about any explicit Cuban-related theme. It’s not what somebody expects a Cuban poet to write about.
Borges, for instance, didn’t like Gabriela Mistral’s poetry. He didn’t like Federico García Lorca’s poetry. I am not in agreement with him in either case, but the reason why is compelling to me. He said that Gabriela Mistral was a professional Chilean. And he didn’t like Garcia Lorca’s poetry because he said that he was a professional Andalusian. “El andalus profesional, la chilena profesional.” I am not a professional Cuban.
This, plus all the difficulties of publishing poetry written in a foreign language in the United States. Of course, I think we, the poets who write in Spanish, publish more in English translation than poets who writes in other languages. But, in general, the United States is not an open country for poetry written in different languages.
Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): There’s a small group of like-minded poets who are looking for poetry that challenges convention. I would say that about, for example, Carrion Bloom Books—who published the really amazing chapbook for midnight minutes—they were so excited about it because it was like nothing they had ever read. And, of course, Action Books, who have been championing experimental poetry in translation for 20 years now.
I do think midnight minutes is ahead of its time. It’s one of those books that is a trailblazer, that is groundbreaking. I was naively sending out to editors of more conventional journals, and their response was often “This is too long;” they wouldn’t even do excerpts. And then there was the question of fit.
So as a translator, I had to find the right presses that would be open to the experimental nature of the poem. Finding that kind of openness took time. It takes time to find your audience. This is now our eighth book in English translation between the United States and the United Kingdom. I think that Víctor’s name has received more recognition, and I’ve received more recognition as a translator. But ultimately I think we just had to find the right people, and it took a long time for us.
SP: Kate, you say that these translations were a work in progress for over fifteen years. How did your approach to the translation change over time?
KMH: It has changed a lot. One of the reasons why this book is so dear to me is because the process of translating it over twenty years has also meant my evolution as a translator of poetry. My approach to translating it has changed very much as I have grown and learned, and the book has informed me deeply. It’s very much a part of my formación as a translator of poetry. In a significant way, the book, both in Spanish and now in English, bookends an incredibly fertile moment of growth in our intellectual lives.
The fact that the book marks such a departure from what Latin American poets were writing at the time was truly a challenge. Neither of us really know where we were going with the poetry or the translation. In my case, I knew I had to go beyond, I had to go to other poetry, and far beyond what was being translated from Spanish. I went back to the historical avant garde, and then to the neo-avant garde in Latin America, and then to other poets and traditions beyond the Spanish language. One of the major influences here is Pierre Joris’s translations of Paul Celan’s late poetry, for example. The translation was informed by a lot of reading and learning about poetry at a very profound level.
SP: For the past few years, the long poem has strongly reemerged in Latin American poetry, and it feels like it followed shortly afterward in English as well—especially in the United States. How do you think this long poem today will affect both languages?
KMH: I think the long poem is starting to have an impact because the best poetry is always resistance. In a world where we’re forced to be compact, where we’re forced into however many characters to use on Twitter, where everything is an image, and everything is fast, the long poem is a defiant act of resistance. The best poetry is always saying, “Hold up, let’s think about this for a second.”
I’m not sure exactly why Víctor started on the long poem, because he was not a long poem person at all. The book before actas de medianoche for him was just what you would think of as a classic book of poetry. A poem a page, basically, sometimes two pages.
VRN: In a word, what I wanted to do was write a poem that was not exactly about one topic. I wanted to reject the poem as a composition, with an introduction, development, and conclusion. I was—and am—writing a kind of organic poetry, organic as in the way we think. It’s not exactly coherent. When we write we do some kind of thinking. We try to organize and edit and put some things first then others second, but that’s not the way we think. Even when you came up with your questions for this interview, Sarah, you probably started with some questions and then you changed the order, and in that order there is some kind of violence.
I didn’t want to write exactly in the way that surrealists called automatic writing, but I definitely wrote in an organic way, being faithful to the way we think, as much as I could. Of course, there was a lot of editing, but those choices were informed by what I wanted. There are themes, but they are intertwined. There is not just one poem about love, one poem about death; everything is mixed.
In midnight minutes there are fourteen cantos, and in every one of them there is a preeminent theme in a certain way. But the canto is not exactly about that theme, because in another canto I talk about those same themes again. The cantos are organized around elements, around moods, around all of these things. It’s not one discourse about mood, not one discourse about elements, not one discourse about politics. But I try to create an ambiance in the poem that gives the reader as much freedom as possible. This gives me freedom too, because it gives me room to create. I see the long poem like a vacuum attracting meaning, and I am the facilitator. In the center there is the facilitator moving from meaning to the vacuum.
KMH: That’s interesting because it’s like the role of the translator. In a certain sense, right?
VRN: The poet as translator? Yes, every writing is a kind of translation.
KMH: You’re the intermediary too.
SP: With the mention of the fourteen cantos, the revitalization and reinvention of the sonnet has been one of the most exciting aspects of English language poetry, especially in the United States. Can you elaborate on the form of the sonnet, and how that affected your writing and your translation of midnight minutes?
VRN: The sonnet is not just a stanza. It’s a way of thinking, like a haiku is a way of thinking. Those stanzas have been used for centuries because it’s more than a form you impose to make some kind of meaning. The sonnet helps you to think and to produce. The only form that is not positive in the way of creating is the form that is imposed upon you. But if you freely choose the form, and as an artist, as a poet, you start using that rule to help you to produce, that is liberation. It is not a constraint; just the opposite. Returning to the image of the vacuum, the sonnet is the vacuum that attracts meaning. You as a poet feel that vacuum.
KMH: Víctor appropriates the sonnet; he uses certain aspects of it. The book itself is a sonnet; each canto is a line, and midnight minutes has fourteen cantos. He uses a traditional metric verse to write his poetry, the hendecasyllable, but he refuses to rhyme. He’s expanding the definition of what a sonnet can do, what it can mean.
In terms of translating form, Víctor is not interested in rhyme, so I don’t have to be either. But I should clarify that even with the poets I translate who write with rhymed verse, I don’t necessarily try to rhyme in the English. In general, I reject this idea that because something is a certain way in one language, it must be the same way in the language that I translate into.
That being said, I think translation itself is form, in the sense that there are some rules I need to follow. The constraints are, “Here’s a poem in one language and I need to write it in another.” This actually offers me the possibility to create because I have limits. But within them, I can do whatever I want.
With Víctor’s use of the sonnet here, I’m not trying to do any equivalence in metric feet, for example. I go completely on how it sounds. There are all sorts of little things I do as a translator to somehow get the message across that something weird is going on, something different that challenges the rules, or doesn’t play by them. Translation is my form, and it’s very productive because of those constraints.
VRN: I don’t write sonnets exactly. I do an appropriation of the sonnet. I don’t use rhyme because I try to keep the language colloquial, and rhyme breaks with that. I don’t want to make poetry sound affected by using rhyme. I came from a movement called Coloquialismo in Spanish and I want to keep that. It’s really important to have that kind of colloquial language in poetry.
What I use very strictly is rhythm and meter. I use rhythm and seven, eleven, and fourteen metric syllables. Because poetry, in my opinion, is a matter of rhythm too. It’s a way of thinking with images, but at the same time, this discourse has to have a kind of rhythm. It’s related to poetry from the beginning; it’s not exactly a conversation, it has something to do with song.
SP: While lines in the English aren’t heptasyllabic like the Spanish, it still shows up in the form of the numbers seven, eleven, and fourteen appearing in the content. These numbers also help punctuate the text alongside the use of white space in place of traditional syntax and structure. Kate, can you speak more on how you brought out specific elements of Víctor’s poetics in the translation?
KH: One of the things that Víctor incorporates—particularly in this book—is the extensive use of enjambment. It’s so intense that even stanzas are enjambed. So, for example, though I’m obviously not a “literal” translator by any means, I do like to play with syntax a lot, to mimic the original world order in Spanish to emphasize the enjambment. I want to send the reader a clear message that the poetry is complex.
VRN: If you want to be a poet, you have to challenge the language. And you cannot write like everybody—you have to see how you can say something that has never been said.
I don’t use punctuation at all because, from the very beginning, poetry is oral. Even if you go to the old medieval texts—the first texts were registers in our language—there is no punctuation. Punctuation was invented with the printing press. Punctuation is something that belongs to literature, not to poetry. And I think poetry and literature are two different things, even though there are relationships between them.
If you don’t use punctuation, you are not establishing certain limits. This again is my principle because I don’t want any borders in poetry. I want to continue the lines, continue the poems, continue this flow. It’s a current of meaning.
SP: You both have touched on how midnight minutes, as an antinationalist salvo, strongly resists all concepts of borders. Kate, you specifically write that it’s:
. . . an alternative reason, a radical change in discourse, an exercise in freedom: no structure, no limits, no edges: only flow anchored in traditional poetic form . . . but without punctuation or rhyme: just one long breath.
I saw this subtly connecting to the kind of paradoxical and hybrid language that shows up throughout the text. We can see that with paradoxical movement like “sale y entra la noche” / “the night leaving coming in.” Do you think that these very active, supposed contradictions further support the resistance of borders and edges within each canto?
KMH: Absolutely, this is such a profound part of Víctor’s poetics. The idea of supposed contradiction, but also embracing contradiction as alternative reason. For instance, in César Vallejo’s “Poema VI,” he says “el traje que vestí mañana.” You hear this and you say, “Wait a minute, a verb conjugated in the past with tomorrow? How can that work?” Well, it can work because Vallejo made it work.
At the same time, it’s a rejection of an imposed Western rationalism that says, “Things need to be chronological. Things need to be in order. This is the opposite of that.” Of course, Víctor is dialoguing with the avant garde tradition of responding to that imposed rationalism, and offering up a different way of thinking. You’re spot on that this playfulness is something that is a major part of midnight minutes.
VRN: I really am thankful to the education that I received at the University of Havana. I have a philosophical background. I was forced to study philosophy deeply, and I was forced to study Hegel, for instance, and Hegel was fundamental for me because I have a dialectic way of thinking very deep within me. Contradictions are fundamental in that way of thinking. One of the functions of poetry is to see many of the contradictions are false, and not really contradictions. You have to find the real ones. You have to move in that direction and explore if to be “inside and outside” is really a contradiction. If “matter and spirituality” is a contradiction. What is the border between one thing and another? What is the border between an idea and a thing?
SP: Connected to that last question, hybrid language is taken one step further in the translation with phrases like “la cifra de muerte” as “deathcipher” and “el flujo de mi rostro” as “my faceflow.” What motivated this choice in the translation?
KMH: These kinds of questions are always hard for me—as a translator you know this—we are often not granted the same openness to creativity as other artists. On one level, I have no idea what motivated it; it’s the magic of art. I could have said “the flow of my face” or “the cypher of death” or “death’s cypher” or “my face’s flow,” for instance. Yet, you sit with a text long enough—and other texts around it—and something happens. A big influence on creating these kinds of neologisms comes from the German-language poet Paul Celan, and particularly, the Pierre Joris translations of his late poetry. Celan creates his own language within the German, and underneath it is the influence of Romanian, Russian, and to a certain extent French.
The other poet I was reading a lot at this time was Georg Trakl, an Austrian expressionist poet, in Daniel Simko’s translation. I was particularly drawn to how both these poets represent nature in their poetry. In general, I am not a big reader of “nature poetry” or “eco-poetry.” I’m from the country; from poor, rural Clackamas County in Oregon. I don’t have an idealized vision of nature at all. But as I read both of these poets—whom I love for many reasons—I realized that the way they talk about nature actually fit well with Víctor’s representations of it in midnight minutes. I wanted to replicate the strange vision of nature that was palpable in the Spanish original. I found ways to represent the strangeness while reading those translations. The idea for me was that if there are no exact words to describe what we see or how we feel, we have to create new words. So, with those translational choices, I tip my hat to Celan and to Trakl (and Joris and Simko); I look at the world through their eyes, through their translators’ eyes, and appropriate it for my own translation. Again, it’s not calculated; it’s a very organic experience. As writers, as poets, we read other texts and something inside exclaims, “Holy shit, I’m going to do that!” Then it just kind of clicks.
VRN: Celan is an example, like Vallejo, of really true poets who write in a language that is not exactly Spanish, or English, or German—every great poet creates his or her own language. And that’s what Celan means. Celan was strange; he used German, but he saw his language from outside. That’s what poets do. Poets are always kind of exiled from their own language, and see their language from outside, see all of the possibilities of language that haven’t been explored.
Neruda said that all love poems say “I love you” but say it in a different way. We are still writing love poems that say “I love you” just because there are infinite ways to say “I love you.” That’s the room for creativity that we have in poetry. That’s what’s really important here. Creativity, to defend creativity.
KMH: In that sense, who I choose to translate and how I choose to translate them is very much connected to expanding definitions of what English is. In many ways, it’s about rejecting what is “supposed to be” or how things “are done.” On an individual level, of course, I want to be creative because it’s in me to be creative. Still, moving beyond that, this is why translation is so incredibly important. Yes, we expand our ideas about others, but we also expand our own language. Translators are so powerful because we get to make these decisions. It’s also why we are often considered traitors. We have the power to influence and to expand language. I basically won’t go into a translation project that doesn’t let me do it. Víctor’s work is perfect because he’s taking the Spanish language and doing all sorts of incredible things to it, so why wouldn’t I take the opportunity to do that and expand English as well?
SP: Something that I am really excited about is how you complicate an “object of desire” not as a passive depiction from the poetic voice but a very active and influential “subject of desire.” It often seems that Spanish is able to maintain a closer sense of passive voice whereas English easily defaults to a more disconnected tone and an objectified poetic subject, especially in depictions of romantic relationships with women. I was drawn to how you suspend English verbs in midnight minutes to capture Víctor’s poetic voice’s relationship with and view of you as the subject. What choices did you make as a translator that helped accomplish this?
KMH: This aspect of the book is so significant, and yet it’s very difficult for me to talk about. As you know, Víctor and I have been partners far longer than this book project. As such, it is sometimes a challenge to separate the “I” and the “you” from us. But, the truth of the matter is that just as the poetic subject is not Víctor, the poetic object is not me. That’s normally obvious, but this is a special case.
Despite those challenges, I believe I have an advantage when I translate Víctor precisely because it is us. Our relationship is one of equal ground and that shows up in the translation. There is a poetic subject and a poetic object of desire, but at the same time, there is not a hierarchy. When I’m translating, I’m not necessarily thinking about it, just like he’s not necessarily thinking about it when he’s writing. It just happens. I greatly appreciate your keen observation. I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing, so thank you.
SP: I figured that it is probably complicated from your “strategic positionality” since it’s closely related to your individual and translation experience. For me, one of the more major examples of this in the text is in “seven”:
the shadow is something more
than your naked soul above me
it is the purest object of desire
my still unshaped longings
to not be however much i am and overflow you
the same thirst water suffers
caress shadow
overtaking death
obstinate subject of desire
Even in the tone of the Spanish and the English here, I thought it was a really strong but very quiet example of handling verbs to avoid the very literal object-objectification of the subject, especially with a romantic subject.
KMH: To begin with, what Víctor is trying to do in the Spanish is to reject a certain kind of romantic relationship represented in poetry in which there is a defined poetic subject, who is normally a male.
VRN: I cannot stand that kind of poem.
KMH: In the same way that he rejects the idea of a poem as composition or having a set theme or topic, he’s also trying to redefine the relationship between the “you” and “I” to a certain extent. All this falls into the realm of a very authentic representation of how we see ourselves and our relationship. I couldn’t ever imagine it any other way; the translation, in that sense, came out naturally and un-prodded.
VRN: This has to do with feminism. In general, there is a lot of literary theory behind this book because as I was writing it I was really obsessed with literary theory. I was reading intensively for years. All that thinking, all that literary theory, helped me to rethink poetry. This is a rethinking of poetry that you have in your hands here. One of those important schools of thought was feminism.
SP: With how you describe feminism and how it has significance in this text, that’s part of why I feel this translation is needed right now. In English poetry and in the United States, we’re caught in this neoliberal understanding that in order for a text to be feminist, it must be prescriptively defined as the concept of status-quo feminism and must assimilate to that. midnight minutes is already resisting and complicating this in terms of anti-assimilation to limitations of form and nationalist ideas of poetry.
KMH: Thank you, Sarah, for your close and careful reading. I would agree with you. Within the context of the Latin American poetry in English translation canon, when U.S. Americans think of these poets, there is this idea that the “I” is representative not only of the poet, but of an entire continent. This “I” is inevitably male, and when it comes to love poetry, there’s no question of who is the subject and who is the object. In this regard too, Víctor’s poetry rejects pre-conceived notions of the “machista” Latin American.
VRN: To go back to Borges’ phrase, I don’t want to be a professional male poet.
KMH: Yes. A total rejection of the professional Latin American poet flying a flag of “this is the way we ride down here.”
SP: Always a singular flag, too.
KMH: Exactly.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and an essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region into English. Her latest book-length publications include prepoems in postspanish by Jorgenrique Adoum, Book of the Cold by Antonio Gamoneda, Every Beat Is Secret by Fina García Marruz, Almost Obscene by Raúl Gómez Jattin, and The Roof of the Whale Poems by Juan Calzadilla. She is the coeditor, with Welsh poet Zoë Skoulding, of the groundbreaking transatlantic translation anthology, Poetry’s Geographies. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation Grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is Managing Editor of Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba. More information at: www.katherinemhedeen.com
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is a poet, journalist, essayist, translator, and university professor. He is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over one hundred collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region, including, in 2015, the coveted Loewe Prize and most recently the Manuel Alcántara Prize, in 2021. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese, and he has read his poetry in more than fifty countries. During the eighties he was the editor of the influential Cuban cultural journal, El Caimán Barbudo, where he published numerous articles on poetry and film. He has brought out a book of interviews with some of the most renowned poets in the Spanish language and has compiled three anthologies of poetry from his generation in Cuba. He has edited critical editions of or written literary criticism on influential Latin American poets like Julián del Casal, Dulce María Loynaz, José Coronel Urtecho, Emilio Ballagas, Cintio Vitier, and Francisco Urondo, among others. He has translated both from English into Spanish (Mark Strand, C.D. Wright, John Kinsella) and from Spanish into English (Juan Gelman, Antonio Gamoneda, José Emilio Pacheco). He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba. More information can be found here: www.victorrodrigueznunez.com
Sarah Pazen is a poet, translator, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Poesía en Acción (Action Books), EX/POST Magazine, The Tulane Review, BreakBread, MAYDAY, and more. She is a 2023 Fulbright Scholar to South Korea and recipient of the 2020 Propper Prize in Poetry. She received her BA in Modern Languages and Literatures from Kenyon College, before serving as the Editorial Assistant at the Kenyon Review. More of her work can be found at sarahpazen.myportfolio.com or on Twitter @copingskills.
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