“El Silencio” / “The Silence”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Do you see an overlap between the act of translation and the act of responding visually to a piece of literature? Artist Kate Baird: Sure. You’re taking something made using one system of meaning and pulling it into another, emphasizing some parts and losing others. Hopefully you’re keeping some of what animated the original piece and also creating something that has meaning of its own. If this broadside were a type of weather, what would it be? Translator Rowena Hill: A brooding afternoon, fine but with a change not too far off.
Poet Igor Barreto was born in San Fernando de Apure, on the plains of Venezuela, in 1952. Poet, critic, publisher and leader of literature workshops. He has published ten books of poems. Translator Rowena Hill taught English Literature at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, where she has been based for more than forty years. She has published five books of poems in Spanish and has translated into English some of Venezuela’s best known poets. Kate Baird is a visual artist and the museum educator at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri.