Cubanology
Publisher: Barrytown/Station Hill Press, Inc.
In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour.” Along with registering common and uncommon vicissitudes of everyday life, the result presents a fusion of languages. Simultaneously national and polycultural, Cubanology streams poetic thought and experience, excerpts from other writings in progress, and the coalescence of a new islandic consciousness – scenes reminiscent of many-minded Odysseus, if home were heart. Visual material appearing throughout Cubanology blends Pérez’s sketches with photographs from that period, as well as art he made after returning to his family home on Havana’s iconic Malécon.
About Kristin Dykstra
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, editor and scholar. She writes about people, places, and culture, with a special interest in motions and intersections amongst Americas. She is the translator of book-length collections by Cuban authors Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales, published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014 and 2016. Her translation of Morales’s The World as Presence was longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award. Currently she is guest-editing a dossier dedicated to Juan Carlos Flores for The Chicago Review. She is also co-translating and editing Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems, a collection by Álvaro Mutis (Colombia) to be published by New York Review Books. With Kent Johnson, she is co-editor of Materia Prima, an anthology showcasing poetry by Amanda Berenguer (Uruguay) and forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Dykstra held a 2012 Literary Translation Fellowship with the National Endowment of the Arts and received the inaugural 2014 Gulf Coast Prize for Literary Translation. She is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont.
About Omar Perez of Havana, Cuba
Omar Pérez’s books include Lingua Franca (2010); Oíste hablar del gato de pelea? (1999, translated as Did You Hear about the Fighting Cat? by Kristin Dykstra, 2010); and Algo de lo Sagrado (1996, translated as Something of the Sacred by Kristin Dykstra and Robert Tejada, 2007). His translations include Italian-Cuban novelist Alba de Céspedes’s Nadie vuelve atrás (2003); and Shakespeare’s As You Like It (as Como Les Guste, 2000). He received Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén Prize for Poetry for Crítica de la Razón Puta (2009) as well as its National Critics’ Prize for his essay collection La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro (2000). His work has also been featured in the anthology The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, A Bilingual Anthology (2009). Pérez was born and raised in Havana. He earned a degree in English at the University of Havana and studied Italian at the Universitá per Straniere di Siena. He has worked as a journalist for El Caimán Barbudo, and as an editor for the magazine La naranja dulce. A former member of the Cuban intellectual group Paideia, he edited the poetry magazine Mantis in the '90s. Ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk, Pérez composes poems that engage languages, Zen, and political and cultural transcendence.
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