WHITE PINE PRESS
an independent literary publisher
Notes From the Sea- Marjorie Agosín - translated by Suzanne Jill Levine
$17.00, ISBN 978-1-945680-73-1
In a stunning collection of prose poems, Agosín reflect on the sea as a force of transformation, a creative force of energy, spirituality, and redemption. She writes about the patterns of the ocean, its moods day and night, and the sea as a constant companion.
My hand writes words in the sand conjuring the sun and water, fine sand so ephemeral that it vanishes into the welcoming sea; my hands, words, the sand erase in this eternal game the swaying ebb and flow that teaches us its rhythms and moments. I approach the shore and write next to the sea and so the sea now writes with me; I remember only words that at another moment were mirrors made of water while the sea speaks to me of splendor and nostalgia.
“These words from Notes from the Sea: A Diary, written by Marjorie Agosín, a dear friend from years back, translated into my words, speak about what drew me into its “rhythms and moments.” The raw experience of the sea which she needed to write, mediated by memory, overpowering like the flood of history, nostalgia, love and loss, and finally translated into writing, also resonates with me. Even though she is south and I am north, for both of us, in reality, that is, in our dreams, the sea is as much our home as the rooms we inhabit, nowhere and everywhere.”
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Marjorie Agosín is a Chilean-American poet and scholar whose work focuses on social justice, feminism, and memory. Her publications include At the Threshold of Memory: New & Selected Poems (2003), The Light of Desire (2010), and I Lived on Butterfly Hill (2014), a young adult novel which won the Pura Belpre medal given by the American Library Association. She has received numerous honors and awards including a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights, a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights, the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor from the Chilean government, and the Dr. Fritz Redlich Global Mental Health and Human Rights Award. She is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American studies and a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.
Suzanne Jill Levine’s books include The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, Manuel Puig & the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions and two poetry chapbooks. An eminent translator whose career began in the early 1970s, she has won many honors and translated over forty volumes of Latin American literary works. Editor and co-translator of a five-volume series of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and non-fictions for Penguin paperback classics (2010), her most recent translation, Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories, was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She currently is writing a “translator’s memoir.”