Skip to content
LALT-Iso-Black
  • menu
  • English
  • Español
Issue 32
Featured Author: Gioconda Belli

Introduction: Gioconda Belli in LALT

  • by María José Bruña Bragado
Print Friendly, PDF & Email
  • December, 2024

This dossier seeks to continue delving into the poetics—heartrending and luminous, vibrant and unmistakable—of Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, winner of the thirty-second Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize (Universidad de Salamanca/Patrimonio Nacional).

Renowned specialists Carmen Alemany Bay of the Universidad de Alicante and Marisa Martínez Pérsico of the Universidad de Udine have contributed enlightening pieces of writing, exploring fundamental themes and vectors of Belli’s work, such as her utopian, hopeful, and prospective vision and her theoretical reflection, in an indispensable look back at the ars poeticas of her literary career. These lines, present in Belli’s writing, open the door to new questions through the sensitive inquiries undertaken by both critics, and are complemented by a selection of poems and an interview that enters into the ethical—but also joyous—dimension proper to the humanist, ever-lively creations of our author.

All of these materials represent valuable contributions to our knowledge of central or prior-known aspects of Belli’s oeuvre, but also to other minor, only apparently more tangential concerns, such as the bewilderment and pleasure generated by her language, the meaning and projection of the impact of orality and music on Central America and on Belli herself, her pained consciousness of injustice, the natural and vital cycles associated with those of a woman, the communicative and also political, feminist, ecocritical potential of her creative imagination, and the great transformations that art can bring about in reality. Only with such trust and optimistic faith in a better future, in the active and everyday reinvention of poetic activism, is it possible to inhabit the earth, even when it charts a course—or precisely because it charts a course—toward unease, failure, and loss.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

 

PURCHASE BOOKS FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE ON OUR BOOKSHOP PAGE

 

Photo: Gioconda Belli at a ceremony dedicated to the literary legacies of Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Ernesto Cardenal, and Claribel Alegría at the Cervantes Institute, Madrid, 2023, by Luis Soto / ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo.
  • María José Bruña Bragado

María José Bruña Bragado is full professor at the Universidad de Salamanca, where she is vice-chair of the Department of Spanish and Hispano-American Literature and coordinator of activities centered on Venezuelan literature in connection with the former “José Antonio Ramos Sucre” Lecture Series. She specializes in Gender Studies and Hispano-American Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (primarily the Southern Cone and Uruguayan poetry), and she researches the artists and exiles of the republican exile in Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay. She has published essays, critical studies, academic articles, translations, and compilations on authors such as Delmira Agustini, Juana de Ibarbourou, Ida Vitale, Idea Vilariño, Cristina Peri Rossi, Marosa di Giorgio, Luisa Valenzuela, Concha Méndez, Luisa Carnés, Elena Fortún, Maruja Mallo, Flora Tristán, Diamela Eltit, Juana Adcock, Gioconda Belli, and Giuliana Tedeschi. She is editor and author of the critical study that precedes the selected poems of Gioconda Belli published as Parir el alba, an anthology prepared to mark the thirty-second Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize (Universidad de Salamanca/Patrimonio Nacional). 

  • Arthur Malcolm Dixon
headshotarthurdixoncroppededited1

Photo: Sydne Gray

Arthur Malcolm Dixon is co-founder, lead translator, and Managing Editor of Latin American Literature Today. His book-length translations include the novels Immigration: The Contest by Carlos Gámez Pérez and There Are Not So Many Stars by Isaí Moreno, both from Katakana Editores, and the poetry collections Intensive Care by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza and Wild West by Alejandro Castro, both from Alliteration Publishing. He works as a community interpreter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where from 2020 to 2023 he was a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

PrevPreviousEditor’s Note: December 2024
Next“What Can Poetry Achieve?”  The Poetic Art of Gioconda Belli: From Times of Struggle to Times of CrueltyNext
RELATED POSTS

Five Poems

By Sergio Raimondi

The method will depend on the type of oven, / as with everything: low heat is recommended, / slow, for around forty to forty-five minutes, / but each kitchen, like…

The Sensoriality of Water in Coral Bracho’s El ser que va a morir

By Javier Alvarado

Seeking Publisher: A Garden Razed to Ashes, translated by James Richie

By Víctor Cabrera

Footer Logo

University of Oklahoma
780 Van Vleet Oval
Kaufman Hall, Room 105
Norman, OK 73019-4037

  • Accessibility
  • Sustainability
  • HIPAA
  • OU Job Search
  • Policies
  • Legal Notices
  • Copyright
  • Resources & Offices
Updated 06/27/2024 12:00:00
Facebook-f X-twitter Instagram Envelope
Latin American Literature Today Logo big width
MAGAZINE

Current Issue

Book Reviews

Back Issues

Author Index

Translator Index

PUBLISH IN LALT

Publication Guidelines

Guidelines for Translators

LALT AND WLT

Get Involved

Student Opportunities

GET TO KNOW US

About LALT

LALT Team

Mission

Editorial Board

LALT BLOG
OUR DONORS
Subscribe
  • email
LALT Logo SVG white letters mustard background

Subscriptions

Subscribe to our mailing list.