With these translations I have endeavored to bring some of Jorge Teillier’s most allusive, complex, and intertextual poems into the English language for the first time. However, as Teillier’s many allusions, dedications, and methods of ekphrasis often toe the line between productive mistranslation, inside joke, and a praxis of referentiality that borders on “rewriting,” this is no small task. Take, for example, “El bosque mágico” (“The Magic Wood”), a poem that shares its title (when translated into English) with a poem by its dedicatee, Henry Treece. Teillier’s poem not only begins with a rough (albeit indirectly attributed) translation of Treece’s refrain into Spanish,¹ but also freely takes much of Treece’s imagery and narrative arc. While the speaker of Treece’s poem meets “…a man with eyes of glass / And a finger as curled as the wriggling worm / And hair as red as rotting leaves / And a stick that hissed like a summer snake,” the speaker of Teillier’s poem encounters “a woman with amaranth eyes / and fingernails growing like friendly caterpillars. / Her hair was the color of sleepless leaves / and a branch guided her like a wise serpent.”²

Juan Carlos Villavicencio, the editor of the anthology from which I have translated these poems,³ provides two important footnotes to “El bosque mágico.” The first footnote is a bit of biographical information on the English poet Henry Treece (1911-1966). The second footnote, however, is Treece’s refrain printed in the original English alongside Villavicencio’s own translation into Spanish.⁴ Though Villavicencio puts these two poems back into conversation with one another, unless one were to read these two poems in their original languages en face it would not be entirely evident just how much Teillier’s poem is grafted onto Treece’s. Villavicencio’s decision to provide Teillier’s source text in its original language (alongside his own translation of Treece’s lines into Spanish) at once provides adequate citational information, while also allowing Teillier’s poem to remain an autonomous textual object (insofar as this is ever possible). Thus, Villavicencio’s rather sparse notes suggest that the likeness of Teillier’s poem to Treece’s is, quite literally, beside the point.

In these translations, I have sought to replicate Villavicencio’s editorial gesture by returning Teillier’s allusions to their original language(s). In the case of “El bosque mágico,” I have not only given the poem the same title as Treece’s,⁵ but also moved Treece’s original refrain from the margins to the top of the page, replacing Teillier’s opening stanza with a more traditional epigraph. Similarly, with Teillier’s ekphrastic poem “El poeta en el campo,” I have chosen to “un-translate” Teillier’s Spanish translation of Chagall’s title, returning it to the French “La Poète Allongé.” Additionally, to further emphasize the mirrored content in this ekphrastic poem, I have taken many liberties with Teillier’s line breaks.⁶

In all instances of “un-translating,” I have maintained Teillier/Villavicencio’s comillas so that neither poet nor editor is ever lost in his own allusions, translations, and annotations. Most importantly, the goal of these “un-translations” is to prioritize the preservation of Spanish whenever possible. For example, in the case of my translation of “En Cualquier Lugar Fuera Del Mundo” (“Anywhere Outside the World”), I have kept Éluard & Péret’s proverb in its original Spanish but more directly attributed this quotation by signaling the source text via the names of its authors (Teillier does not).

Though Teillier’s poems are incredibly dense, his allusions often function as intimate forms of direct address: his epigraphs are epitaphic, his dedications apostrophic. We might further consider intertextuality in this fashion. And so, to preserve this intimacy, I have refrained from putting any footnotes in these poems. Instead, these translations are my best attempts at conveying the uniqueness of Teillier’s poetics as a form of direct correspondence though allusiveness.

¹ From Treece’s poem: “The wood is full of shining eyes, / The wood is full of creeping feet, / The wood is full of tiny cries; / You must not go to the wood at night!” And from Teillier: “Y el Poeta me dijo: ‘el bosque está lleno de crepitantes pasos. / El bosque está lleno de agonizantes chillidos. / ¡Nadie debe entrar esta noche a bosque!’”

² Here, I have translated these lines more “literally” than I do in my own translations, for easy comparison.

³ Teillier, Jorge. Nostalgia de la Tierra, edited by Juan Carlos Villavicencio, Cátedra, 2022.

⁴ This is a trend throughout Nostalgia de le Tierra.

⁵ “The Magic Wood” rather than “The Magic Forest”

⁶ A trend that continues throughout my translations of Teillier’s work