Description:
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito translated by Richard Gwyn. The reading will be hosted by Curtis Bauer. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.
Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.
Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.
Fabio Morábito is one of Mexico's best loved and most entertaining contemporary writers, his narratives marked by a humane irony and a philosophical resignation to the vagaries of his society and the irresistible tyrannies of time. Some of his poems make the reader laugh out loud, and Richard Gwyn's translations are true to the tone and manner of the originals. This is the first collection of his poems to appear in English, putting right a significant omission.
The fifty-four poems in Invisible Dog were selected by the poet and translator in collaboration and draw from his five published collections spread over four decades. Readers enjoy a comprehensive introduction to his work in breadth and depth. His formal and thematic developments illuminate the wider context of modern Latin American writing, its inventive playfulness, its evasion of conventions of 'national culture'.
Morábito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. His position as a poet writing in a second language contributes to his unique voice and vision. It is possible in these versions to detect elements of the poet's 'foreignness' in his straightforward lexical choices, which have the effect of making the poems somehow vulnerable, as in 'Journey to Pátzcuaro', a sort of allegory for the immigrant experience.
About the speakers:
Richard Gwyn grew up in south Wales, and lived for many years in Greece and Spain. His travels in Latin America form the subject of a chronicle, Ambassador of Nowhere (2024). He is the author of four collections of poetry and three novels, and his memoir, The Vagabondâs Breakfast, won Wales Book of the Year for nonfiction in 2012. He has translated poetry and short fiction by many Latin American writers. The Other Tiger, a major dual-text anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry, containing work by nearly 100 poets, was published by Seren in 2016. His translations of the poetry of Darío Jaramillo, Impossible Loves (Carcanet), was shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclán in 2020. His alter ego writes about literary and everyday matters on Ricardo Blancoâs Blog.
Fabio Morábito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. He has published five collections of poetry, including De lunes todo el año, which won the Aguascalientes National Prize for Poetry in 1991 and Lotes baldíos, which was awarded the 1995 Carlos Pellicer prize. His poetry and short stories have established him as one of Mexicoâs best-known writers over the past 30 years. He has compiled and retold a book of 125 oral Mexican short stories, Cuentos populares mexicanos (2014), which won the âWhite Raven Prizeâ in 2015. His novel El lector a domicilio (2018) was awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Award. He is also a prolific translator from Italian, and his own books have been widely translated.
Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator. His most recent poetry collection is
American Selfie. His translation publications of contemporary Spanish-language literature include Fabio Morábito's
Mothers and Dogs and Antonio Skármeta's
The Names of the Things That Were There (Other Press, 2023) María Sánchezâs
Land of Women (Trinity University Press, 2022) and Clara Muschiettiâs
This Could Take Some Time (Eulalia Books, 2022). He lives in Spain and Texas.
