Only The Road Solo El Camino

Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry.

Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.

Cuban culture has long been available to English speakers via translation. This study examines the complex ways in which English renderings of Cuban texts from various domains—poetry, science fiction, political and military writing, music, film—have represented, reshaped, or amended original texts. Taking in a broad corpus, it becomes clear that the mental image an Anglophone audience has formed of Cuban culture since 1959 depends heavily on the decisions of translators. At times, a clear ideological agenda drives moves like strengthening the denunciatory tone of a song or excising passages from a political text. At other moments, translators’ indifference to the importance of certain facets of a work, such as a film’s onscreen text or the lyrics sung on a musical performance, impoverishes the English speaker’s experience of the rich weave of self-expression in the original Spanish. In addition to the dynamics at work in the choices translators make at the level of the text itself, this study attends to how paratexts like prefaces, footnotes, liner notes, and promotional copy shape the audience’s experience of the text.

In her new book, Exporting Revolution, Margaret Randall explores the Cuban Revolution's impact on the outside world, tracing Cuba's international outreach in health care, disaster relief, education, literature, art, liberation struggles, and sports. Randall combines personal observations and interviews with literary analysis and examinations of political trends in order to understand what compels a small, poor, and underdeveloped country to offer its resources and expertise. Why has the Cuban health care system trained thousands of foreign doctors, offered free services, and responded to health crises around the globe? What drives Cuba's international adult literacy programs? Why has Cuban poetry had an outsized influence in the Spanish-speaking world? This multifaceted internationalism, Randall finds, is not only one of the Revolution's most central features; it helped define Cuban society long before the Revolution.

Time's Language contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, and autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. As US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera writes, "Here are Margaret Randall's decades of love, ink, tears, contestation and light—let us bow in gratitude for this truth-telling, daring, border-breaking, pioneering long-time volume of soul fire."

Time' s Language I (Wings Press, 2018) included selections from Margaret Randall' s poetry collections beginning with her first self-published book in 1959 and ending six decades later. Time' s Language II picks up where its predecessor left off, enabling readers to savor Randall' s later, more mature, work. Here are robust selections from Against Atrocity, Out of Violence into Poetry, Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises, Vertigo of Risk, Your Answer is Your Map, and Home, as well as Starfish on a Beach— the author' s poetic response to the Covid pandemic— and her most recent as yet uncollected production. Together, the two volumes present the range and depth of a poet whose work belongs to two centuries and records a woman' s intimate life as well as her personal involvement with some of the most dramatic events of our time. A life of poetry in its fullest expression!

Beginning with Number 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research underway in specialized areas.

During the strange and unsettling second year of COVID-19, Margaret Randall suddenly found herself writing short stories. The author of over 150 books of poetry, essays, biography, nonfiction and translations, Lupe's Dream and Other Stories is her first collection of fiction. These stories are as unsettling as the times. In one way or another, each references life in a near-future where scarcities have become dramatic, space strangely unfamiliar, and time moves in unexpected directions. After several intense months of writing, the stories stopped as mysteriously as they'd begun.