Description:
Named one of 75 Notable Translations of 2024 by World Literature Today
The debut English language poetry collection by noted Mexican author Isabel Zapata, A Whale is a Country explores humanity's relationship to the natural world through a multitude of poignant angles.Brief description:
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish- to-English translator. Her latest book-length translations include In Vitro by Isabel Zapata (2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (2023), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (2022), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022), and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (2022). Other translations have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry and among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). As a poet, Robin's work has been selected for the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology and appears in the The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. Her collections have been published as bilingual English-Spanish editions in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Literary Translation Centre, the Community of Writers, and Under the Volcano.
Review Quotes: "I have been anticipating Robin Myers's translation of A Whale Is a Country (Una ballena es un país) by Isabel Zapata. These razor-sharp poems are rendered with clarity and require the reader to sit up, to pay attention to the world around us. Not only is the poet interested in the language of animals, she presents for us our precarious entanglements with the environment as destroyer gods and sensitive custodians. It's clear to the poet: the choice is ours. She asks 'What does it say about us that we murder what we want to keep?' as a rhetorical device to prove our fickle commitment to this planet, its animals, and ultimately to ourselves. This is a book of ecopoetry, rendered bilingually, that I will return to again and again."-- "Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria"