12 Queer Poetry Collections in Translation to Add to Your End-Of-Year Reading List
Poetry is uniquely situated at the intersection of the personal and political landscape. The art form possesses an immense amount of power, and amplifying cross-cultural Queer voices is crucial. Though there are now more poetry and short stories by LGBTQ+ writers and translators being published than ever before, the pieces are more frequently than not found in online magazines (like ours!), in limited-edition anthologies, and on blogs or social media. Great strides have been made, but in many parts of the world, coming out or publicly stating that you identify as LGBTQ+ can negatively impact your work, your livelihood, and distressingly often, your physical safety. As such, it’s understandable that sometimes, it requires a little more digging to find entire poetry collections.
In some countries, there may be mainstream tolerance or acceptance, but that doesn’t mean that the danger is gone. Due to the oppression and marginalization Queer people experience on micro and macro levels globally, a poet or translator publicly identifying as LGBTQ+ or addressing those themes in their work is still a risk. Poetry is a distinctive method of examining identity, resilience, and community, twisting language and syntax to reveal personal and universal truths, lending words to experiences a reader might have previously found isolating or difficult to express. There is a long storied history of poetry in Queer spaces being used as a tool for activism, defying erasure and championing the right to exist alongside the dominant paradigm. It’s important to allow Queer people to contribute to the narrative previously drafted about us without us.
There are, of course, plenty of Queer works published in their original languages that haven’t yet been translated into English (and if an author or translator is reading this and wants to submit a piece, we’d be thrilled to read it!). The world is also lucky to have so many incredible novels in translation that explore queerness and identity. One of our translation editors, Jacqueline Schaalje, reviewed one such novel. Novels give a reader something to chew on, a longer message to dissect and digest. Poetry, on the other hand, is urgent. It’s a meditation in an emergency. It’s easier to disperse, faster to land, and challenges preconceived notions with an immediacy, bolstered by the fact that everything— down to the choice to use a definite or indefinite article — matters in terms of meaning and impact.
I spent six months in Bolivia chronicling lesbian and feminist poetry in social justice movements and translated some individual pieces; as I dove in, I began to fully realize what great care needs to be taken with the nuance and complexity of language, especially when translating topics that can be sensitive or even perilous to discuss in a public sphere. Translating a single poem is already an enormous feat, not to mention an entire collection. I’m looking forward to seeing more translated poetry collections in the coming years, and I know we’re on the precipice of something great.
Bringing Queer voices to multiple languages allows readers to bear witness to and find affinity with the struggles and joys of what it means to be LGBTQ in different parts of the world. However, with exceptions, the makeup of the publishing industry is still largely focused on the majority (white, straight, cisgender); thus, finding published works of poetry in translation where the author or translator directly references their sexual orientation or gender identity (or that of their characters) can sometimes be a daunting task. As a Queer writer and translator myself, I take this as a personal challenge. Sappho aside, here’s a non-exhaustive round-up in no particular order:
1. Law of Conservation
Author: Mariana Spada; Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers; Publisher: Phoneme, an imprint of Deep Vellum (2023); “Ley de conservación” Ediciones Gog y Magog (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019)
Aptly titled, Mariana Spada’s collection is both in conversation and at a crossroads with what it means to inhabit a trans identity when the concept of womanhood is precarious and memory is equally so. I hesitate to use phrases like “hauntingly gorgeous” but these poems warrant it. Spada explores the rites and trappings of femininity while moving through axioms and postulates that bind scientific law as we know it with the unreliability of self and the aching and often futile search for where we belong. Spada interrogates the symbiotic relationship between transformation and conservation, “the part that hates itself/ and the part you can live with/ have the same mass/ and it could float/ or sink…” This is a collection to sink your teeth into, masterfully translated by Robin Myers.
2. Life in Space
Author: Galina Rymbu; Translated from the Russian by Joan Brooks; Contributor: Eugene Ostashevsky; Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2020)
In Life in Space, Galina Ryumbu employs the fallibility of memory and the intricate, intimate, infinite nature of time to interrogate gender- and sexuality-based violence and oppression as well as the propaganda and manipulation in a post-Soviet existence. Deftly translated by Joan Brooks, the poems weave the personal with the political in a manner that’s at once heartbreaking and hopeful. She plays with elements, cosmic visions, light, and shadows to an extent where the reader feels tugged on a journey through galaxies, ripping apart the time-space continuum as easily as unraveling a tapestry from a single loose thread.
3. Decapitated Poetry
Author: Ko-hua Chen; Translated from the Chinese by Wen-Chi Li and Colin Bramwell; Publisher: Seagull Books (2023)
Where to even begin with the first explicitly queer poetry collection published in Taiwan? In two major parts, like a head removed from a neck, Decapitated Poetry traverses the speculative and philosophical turmoil of the brain in contrast with the physical desires of the body against a backdrop of shifting technology. The first half consists of pieces from the author’s 1995 book, among which is the 40-some-odd-page piece from the perspective of an android/human hybrid creature. In the translators’ foreword, they discuss “the fascinating interplay between queer identity and technology.” It’s hard to define this collection in a paragraph. Give it a read.
4. Glory Hole
Author: Kim Hyun; Translated from the Korean by Archana Madhavan, Suhyun J Ahn; Publisher: Seagull Books (2022); Original title: 글로리 홀 (2014)
Much has been written about this collection, and for good reason. Calling Glory Hole a collection of poetry might be technically correct, but the book as a whole refuses to be pigeonholed into a genre. Kim Hyun uses footnotes, essays, and prose poetry, often set against a backdrop of sci-fi dystopia, to reckon with what it means to be Queer. Though the poems are often cryptic and rely heavily on external and metatextual references, pornographic elements, and eccentric puns, the expansiveness of this oft-puzzling book works in its favor.
5. Amora: Stories
Author: Natalia Borges Polesso; Translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches; Publisher: Amazon Crossing (2014, 2020)
In this hybrid collection of both poems and short stories, Polesso paints a nuanced and complex portrait of Sapphic love, desire, pain, and triumph. The work doesn’t shy away from the struggles of being closeted, feeling ashamed, being discriminated against, or coming to terms with the weight of being a lesbian in the modern world; rather, it embraces the heartache with as much tenderness as a woman loving a woman entails, with a raw vulnerability and a resilience I’d love to see more of in contemporary literary translation.
6. Unexpected Vanilla
Author: Lee Hyemi; Translated from the Korean by Soje; Publisher: Tilted Axis Press (2020)
Shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Prize in Poetry, Hyemi’s Vanilla is anything but. Erotic, sensual, sensitive, and intimate, the collection feels alive and pulsing with desire and longing. Soje’s translation is careful and inquisitive, allowing the author space to explore the quietude mingled with the loud, encouraging the reader to not assume anything about the author while simultaneously granting agency and power to someone navigating the complexities of life. This gorgeous, image-driven, surrealist read is something I’ll have to return to. In Vanilla, Hyemi weaves in the beauty of nature with the gut punches of reality, “like lovers parting at the border/ like the sun collapsing with its face on the water/ blurring the boundaries of the world.”
Other recommended queer poetry collections:
Words Breathe, Creatures of Elsewhere (Nhã Thuyên, translated from the Vietnamese by Kaitlin Rees, Vagabond Press, 2016)
The Last Innocence/ The Lost Adventures (Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Rossi, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019)
Within the Sweet Noise of Life: Selected Poems (Sandro Penna, translated from the Italian by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2021)
The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (Eds. Aditi Angiras, Akhil Katyal, HarperCollins India, 2020)
Boomerang / Bumerán (Achy Obejas, bilingual Spanish and English, Beacon Press, 2021)
Tracing the Unspoken (Milan Šelj, translated from the Slovenian by the author and Harvey Vincent, A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2019)
PEPPER CUNNINGHAM (she/her) is a writer, editor, and translator based in the mountains of Southern Ecuador. She is the Translation Editor at MAYDAY Magazine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Rust + Moth, Rough Cut Press, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, “Hope Is The Thing With Teeth”, was recently released with Bottlecap Press. Find her @pepwriteswords on Twitter.
