Posts featuring Judith Santopietro

Along a Spine of Dreams: An Interview with Judith Santopietro on Nahuatl as Heritage Language

May 15, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I attempt to have my writing reflect the process of not having inherited a language due to colonization.

 Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa (translated by Ilana Luna and published by Orca Libros in 2019) was sketched by the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi as “a book that dialogues with nature” with “a sensitivity that picks up on the sublime, the cosmovision, the song and the spiritual elements.” Through those poems, Santopietro enables her readers to hear Incan hymns from a distance while marveling at the mountainscape of the great Andes. Her debut poetry collection, Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010), was praised by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón in Indigenous Cosmolectics (2018) as a mold-breaking contribution to Nahua women’s poetry, in league with Yolanda Matías García, another Nahua poet. In mediating on her heritage language and its capacity to evoke such vivid scenes, Santopietro reveals: “I experiment with the language, Nahuatl, into my poems to recreate sounds, rhythms, and even some memories of my foremothers.’”

In 2004, Santopietro, whose writings in Spanish have elements of the Nahuatl, Quechua, and Aymara languages, also founded Iguanazul, a translingual literary magazine that promotes the oral literatures and traditions of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The publication has since featured vital contemporary voices such as Irma Pineda, Macario Matus, Inti Barrios, Martín Rodríguez Arellano, Celerina Patricia Sánchez Santiago, Esteban Ríos Cruz, Mikeas Sánchez, and Kalu Tatyisavi—in both original texts and Spanish translations. Following this intersection between languages and heritages, individual expression and political representation, I spoke with Santopietro on how Mexikano as a silenced heritage percolates into her original writings in Spanish as a Nahua descendant, the collection Tiawanaku, and how she probes into displacement, language extinction, and indigeneity. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You write mainly in Mexican Spanish, your mother tongue. Your writings, however, borrow from other languages such as Quechua, Aymara, and most especially your heritage language, the Nahuatl of Mexico’s largest group of indigenous peoples, the Nahua. Could you tell us more about these choices, political, ancestral, and beyond—as a poet, essayist, and translator?

Judith Santopietro (JS): Yes, as you mention, my mother tongue is Mexican Spanish—which is so close to the Nahuatl language because of all the influences that remain in our daily speech, like the diminutives that show affection. We say, “¿quieres agüita?, ¿se te antoja un tamalito? ¿te sirvo un chocolatito?”; and without realizing it, Nahuatl words slip in.

Beyond the lexicon that has remained in Mexican Spanish, there are also other, more specific manifestations like forms of healing, prayer, sowing, cooking, and even the arrangement of space in my aunt’s house, all of which led me to make the political, ancestral decision to study Nahuatl—which is called Mexikano in the town where my paternal family is from. My aunt once told me that my grandmother Otilia spoke Mexikano, but unfortunately she died young, and I couldn’t hear her speak. Still, that was doubtlessly another reason I decided to study this language.

I wasn’t immersed in the natural listening-learning process of this language because after her, no one else spoke it, but Nahua stories and beliefs remained in the rural-indigenous region where my family comes from, and they have completely influenced my writing to this day. That’s where my decision to consider myself a Nahua descendant comes from. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2025 Issue Is Here!

April 17, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

What’s the antidote to a world of trade wars and closed borders? Quite possibly our Spring issue, celebrating the free circulation of ideas!

What do we need from each other? What do we gain if we give? At the dawn of a new age of tariffs, the dominant mode of exchange has become a kind of brute transactionalism—before one hands over anything, one must demand something of equal value in return. But what if simply giving is the better way to flourish—the way to a richer commons? It is in this spirit that we proudly unveil “The Gift.” Gathering new work from as far afield as Paraguay, Lesotho, Senegal, and Guyana, our Spring 2025 edition centers the generosity of translation—an act that Youn Kyung Hee, invoking Paul Celan, rightly compares to a gift: “For Celan, the event of poesis goes beyond receiving a gift from some unnamed sender; it also comprises the work of sending it out once more, a transmission bottled in glass.” How fitting, then, that our interview section, which usually features major authors in the world literature canon (such as the recently deceased Mario Vargas Llosa, in our Spring 2018 issue), cedes the floor to two of the most prominent practitioners of the art working today: Robin Moger, acclaimed translator of contemporary and classical Arabic literature, and Anton Hur, who went from debuting as a translator in these pages nine years ago to becoming the Booker International Prize-nominated voice in English of Korean authors like Sang Young Park. Hur’s interview pairs perfectly with our Korean Literature Feature, organized in partnership with LTI Korea, whose many highlights include Jeong Ho-seung’s bittersweet “sorrow by special delivery” and talented director-writer Lee Chang-dong’s absurd comedy in which a scrounging couple on vacation return to find their house burgled.

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Elsewhere in this edition beautifully illustrated by South Korean guest artist GLOO / Yejin Lee, the theme of gifts—often passed down from the generation prior—persists. The opening trio of pieces (Men and Bread, Long Shadows, and Taxidermy) each consider the tendrils of paternal legacy, but the title of most dad-haunted narrator might be a contest between Pierric Bailly tracing the real-life events leading up to his father’s death in the woods and Song Seung Eon’s imaginary fisherman addressing his macabre haul (“Skull, are you my father? Are you something that was my father?”). In Christopher Carter Sanderson’s sparkling update of Anton Chekhov’s drama The Gull, by contrast, Treplev wrestles with having a celebrity for a mother. (“On her own, she’s a sexy young actress. When I’m near, she looks like a soccer mom.”) Monica Ong—whose visual poems drawing on astronomy have been featured in  Scientific American, among other places—likens her parents to intrepid “cosmonauts” for migrating from their native Philippines to a new home in the US. Finally, against the backdrop of brutal deportations from the US, poet Judith Santopietro calls attention to the gifts inherent even in the most dangerous of international journeys, juxtaposing a glimpse of black orchids from atop a freight train with the eventual hardship of “distributing food and christmas gifts” in a foreign land. Too often portrayed as mere victims, Santopietro’s poem reminds us of the agency of immigrants, inviting us to recognize their journeys as choices they have made, and to consider that these, too, may be gifts, if we allow that possibility.

If Asymptote has been a gift to you, consider helping us stick around so that it may be a gift to others down the road. Remember: the best way to support us is to join us as a sustaining or masthead member (and signing up only takes three minutes, but the good it does reverberates through time).

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Tampoco tenemos nombre / We, too, are nameless: A Conversation with Ilana Luna

May 17, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

When I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling . . .

I discovered one of my favorite poets—the musician, filmmaker, and diplomat Gaspar Orozco—through Ilana Luna in the pages of Scotland-based Reliquiae: A Journal of Nature, Landscape, and Mythology. In Luna’s lulling translation, Orozco’s El Libro de los Espejismos (The Book of Mirages) meditates on the lacuna between memory and myth, and the interstices between sentience and sleep. In this interview, I asked Luna about, among other things, translating Mexican poet Gaspar Orozco and essayist Carlos Monsiváis, as well as Mexican literature in translation, with small indie presses as their prime movers. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love your translation of Gaspar Orozco published at Reliquiae Journal! And you have a forthcoming book of translation from Orozco’s poems under the Corbel Stone Press imprint, Xylem Books. What should Orozco readers like me expect from this new title? 

Ilana Luna (IL): In fact, we have several manuscripts we’ve been working on. The first we completed is El libro de los espejismos/The Book of Mirages. It’s quite a marvelous book, with prose poetry as well as formal poetry, haiku, sonnet, octaves. They were the most fun to translate, truth be told; I love the puzzle or game-like challenge that formal limitations pose. Several of these poems appeared in Reliquiae, as well as in the July 2021 issue of Indian publication Poetry at Sangam. The one you mention, with Corbel Stone Press, is what we’re currently working on. It is more of an anthology of Orozco’s work, with a focus on natural phenomena and a mythic tone, taken from across his ten-book corpus. As always, Gaspar’s poetry is full of luminescent landscapes, vignettes, and often, has a mesmerizing, rhythmic quality. I try to capture this in my translations.

AMMD: In his prólogo to Lapidario: Antología del aforismo mexicano (2014), critic-translator Hiram Barrios maps the presence of aforismos en verso (“aphorism taking refuge in the short poem”) within Mexican poetry since the late nineteenth century, naming Gaspar Orozco’s father as a practitioner of this “anomalous” free-verse that “questions the nature of genre.” Do you think Orozco has followed in his father’s footsteps, and how, if so, has that influenced the way you translated his works?

IL: I’m quite sure that Orozco was deeply impacted by his father’s love of literature, and he tells stories of youthful interactions with preeminent Mexican scholars and literati—for example, the infrarealist poet José Vicente Anaya, also from Chihuahua, whose famous poem “Híkuri” is a reference in our “Notas de un cuaderno de híkuri”/ “Notes from a Peyote Journal.” Orozco’s prose poetry has been elegantly analyzed in “‘Image Machine’: Gaspar Orozco’s Book of the Peony and the Prose Poem Sequence as Perceptual Trick,” Helen Tookey’s chapter of Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022). As for how this paternal influence has impacted my translation, I’d have to say not very much—or at least not directly. I know I can’t be alone in this, but when I translate, my approach is much more of an interpretation, in the musical sense; it is a jazz riff, it is a feeling, it is something like a cover. It is always a direct interface between me and the poem, nothing else. As sheer as that, it is an immersion and a remaking, a new thing unto itself. 

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