The Loose Pearl
Paula Ilabaca Núñez
Translated by Daniel Borzutzky
148 pages, perfect bound trade paperback, 6" x 6"
Winner of the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
From the judges' citation by Baba Badji, Mona Kareem, and Julia Leverone: "In this courageous translation of Paula Ilabaca Núñez's The Loose Pearl, Daniel Borzutzky moves through the prose and the poetic, acutely, to bring us closer to the vulnerability of language. With such risks, he takes translation into a new direction, opening a new conversation around the practice and the choice of the translator. Borzutzky introduces English readers to the work of Ilabaca Núñez not through a selection of her work, but with a specific artwork that she had first published on her blog in 2017 as a series of poems and images. The speaker in this book is split between the pearl and the loose one as she challenges her translator to carry her poems through gender, language, power, and sex. Ilabaca Núñez's Spanish is neatly and brilliantly rendered so that the anguish of experience comes through; Borzutzky extends the legacy of revolutionary Chilean poetry through this deft work, adding to a complex national and global conversation about what poetry can do for, and in, the social and political spheres, and how translation raises words and bodies to the stage."
ABOUT THE LOOSE PEARL
Brimming with fury and ferocity, The Loose Pearl by award-winning Chilean poet Paula Ilabaca Núñez, translated by Daniel Borzutzky, interrogates the ineffable complexities of interiority in the wake of rupture, of trauma. Through the screen of the speaker's archipelago of internal identities—the loose one, the pearl, the mare—readers are drawn into an intense and ongoing prose-poetry monologue of self-struggle, as the speaker attempts to avoid shattering completely while facing total collapse amid the relentless combine the patriarchy continually hefts—body and soul—upon women. Borzutzky's translation deftly handles the visceral and pent-up style of these prose poems, gifting readers with pages to be pored over breathlessly, out loud, and often. Ilabaca Núñez's English-language debut weaves an allegory of apathy, anger, and sexual politics, where her speaker's cherished identities get shaped and reshaped at the hands of masculine archetypes—the master, the eunuch, the king, the jeweler—until something new emerges, a polished and pointed rage that spills over and dares, at last, to voice what once was unutterable.
PRAISE FOR THE LOOSE PEARL
The Loose Pearl is a waterfall of words that wells up and demands to be read out loud, loudly. The loose one, the pearl, the mare—a woman seeking wholeness and a total identity in a world that tends to carve women up and discard the unseemly. Daniel Borzutzky's is the fearless translation of a poet capable of reading between lines and capturing the visceral xxx of the "basic territory." From a Chile roiling with discontent and a refusal to submit comes this dispatch that relates the contradiction and complication/ complexity/ of inhabiting a female body—that "porous carriage"—in a city that refuses and dismisses her. Uncomfortable, subversive, and joyful.
—Megan McDowell
Paula Ilabaca Núñez's The Loose Pearl is an intense, bawdy, bodily fairytale about sexuality, and it is an "eruption" of poetry. It's the kind of eruption that takes place in writing when you move beyond expectations and conventions and good taste into a realm where anything can come into play as long as the poet has the skills and daring to make it so. In The Loose Pearl, fucking is fucking (it has to be, it's how the text writes the body), but it is also the act of engaging in and attending to this act or moment of eruption. This is the most important truth about writing. This is both the first lesson and the last lesson of how to write poetry.
—Johannes Göransson
