Lupita Eyde-Tucker is a bilingual poet and translator working in English and Spanish. She is a native of New Jersey. She moved to Guayaquil, Ecuador when she was twelve. Since then, she has been writing and translating poems from Spanish to English. She is the winner of the 2021 Unbound Emerging Poet Prize, and her recent translation book, Homeland of Swarms, was published by co•im•press. The book was also reviewed by the Poetry Foundation in 2024. The original author, Oriette D’Angelo, is currently a PhD Candidate in Spanish with a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish, also from University of Iowa. I met Eyde-Tucker as a classmate at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and she was working on D’Angelo’s next manuscript. Eyde-Tucker explained, “Homeland of Swarms is not just a work of political poetry. The poems each paint individual pictures from different standpoints of coping with and fighting against disease.”
Naoko Fujimoto: Your translation book, Homeland of Swarms by Oriette D’Angelo, was recently released. In your translator’s note,
“Poetry is a powerful medium that cuts through the white noise of mainstream media and can reach a person’s heart and imprint it with images painted with words. I felt there had to be poets in Venezuela who are writing about the crisis, so in 2017, I set out to find them. I searched for six months before stumbling upon Oriette D’Angelo’s blog.”
How did you meet the original author and manuscript? Could you tell me a bit about your translation process and relationship with the original author?
Lupita Eyde-Tucker: When I first began searching for a poet to translate, I knew the type of poet I was hoping to find but I didn’t know who that would be. I started searching on the Internet after attending Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference for the first time in June 2017. My workshop leader was Christopher Merrill, and I learned so much from him and the other participants in the workshop. I left that experience inspired and with a mission to translate underrepresented writers from South America, preferably from Venezuela, Ecuador, or Bolivia. I knew that the economic situation in those countries was causing intense suffering and mass migration, and I wanted to translate poets who were writing about that. I searched on the Internet for months, until one day in January 2018 I did a Google search and stumbled upon an interview in Spanish with Oriette. There was a poem included with the interview, and when I read it, I thought, “This might be my poet!” I Googled her name, and came across her website. I saw that she had a poetry collection, so I wrote her an email asking if I could translate her book. She wrote back about a half hour later, book attached! I began translating her poems and submitting translations to literary magazines, but it wasn’t until 2019 when Oriette spent winter break in the Miami area that we finally met in person.
I translated the poems in batches, starting with the ones that I connected with the most. When I translate, I print out the originals and use a pencil to translate in the margins. If I encounter a word or image that I’m unsure about, I’ll search in a Spanish thesaurus and find similar words, and then brainstorm the English translations of those synonyms. My focus tends toward understanding the image, trying to bring that across, and to not necessarily translate the words literally. In that initial process I give myself a lot of permission to push the image in English, and in the margins, I’ll expound on alternate understandings or words to choose from. I use both English and Spanish thesauruses a lot.
After I complete that process with a poem, then I transcribe my translation into a Word document, and in the process of transcribing I’ll make more deliberate choices. Once it’s typed into a document then I’ll read it out loud: first in Spanish, then the initial typed-up draft of my English translation, to get a sense of the musicality of the poem, and to see if I can mimic the pacing or cadence in my translation. Reading the poem out loud multiple times is essential, because ultimately it has sound like a poem in English. This second phase is where the real work and time is spent. I’ll go back over the poem multiple times over the course of days or weeks, sometimes months, depending on my schedule.
Occasionally, I’ll accumulate a bunch of questions to ask Oriette, just to make sure I’m on the right track and understand the meaning of the original poem, what she intended the poem to convey. Sometimes I can bring that across really well, and other times, if I chose my words carefully, I can work in a double meaning I might uncover. Other times I might not be sure what the meaning of word is in Venezuelan slang and Oriette clears up any misunderstandings I might have. It’s all word games and endlessly entertaining.
Naoko Fujimoto: This manuscript has a variety of poetic formats such as prose, visual/text collage, and haiku-like short lines. Did the original manuscript follow a similar format? Or was it your translator’s decision? What was the most challenging decision to make when you re-form the original text into English?
Lupita Eyde-Tucker: I wanted to try to preserve the form of the poems because Oriette was so deliberate in her line breaks and formal choices. The prose poems in Oriette’s collection are especially powerful, so there was never a chance that I would even try to mess with that. I think that in “Homeland of Swarms” there is a good balance between poems that use the blank space on the page and the denser-looking blocks of texts of the prose poems. I even tried to preserve the publisher’s line breaks, which now I know only appeared in the original book because a line was too long for the page! Most of all, though I believe that the formal choices that Oriette made are important to preserve because they call back to poets that I feel might influence her work, such as Miyo Vestrini, Yolanda Pantin, Martha Kornblith, and Enrique Winter, to name a few.
Naoko Fujimoto: What else are you working on? What can we look forward to from your future projects?
Lupita Eyde-Tucker: I’m working on translating Oriette’s second collection! That’s been in the works for the past year now, and I will be traveling around the country to read and introduce “Homeland of Swarms” to more readers. I would love for this collection to inspire others to translate Oriette’s work into other languages such as Italian or German. I am also working on completing my own poetry collections— I have two manuscripts that I’ve been writing, one that is mostly finished and the other that started as my MFA thesis. I would also love to read and possibly translate other South American poets from Venezuela, Ecuador, or Bolivia, so if you know of any, please let me know!
Naoko Fujimoto was born, raised in Nagoya, Japan, and studied at Nanzan Junior College. She was an exchange student and received a B.A. and M.A. from Indiana University. Her poetry collections are “We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan”, winner of C&R Press Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Award by C&R Press (2022), “Where I Was Born”, winner of the editor’s choice by Willow Books (2019), “Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory” by Tupelo Press (2021), and four chapbooks. She is a RHINO associate & translation editor and Tupelo Quarterly translation editor. She is a Bread Loaf Translation full scholarship recipient and the 2023 Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. She is a first judge of Illinois Center for the Book: Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (2021 – current).