One-Handed: poetry by Mexicans, translators, Scots and Google

This is the first of three exclusive publications from the One-Handed project in Mexico City Lit. Poems by Amaranta Caballero and Lorna Callery, with Guido Floyd’s collage series Metamorphosis. Read the poems here: http://mexicocitylit.com/one-handed-1-survival-journey-into-exile/

One-Handed is an experimental translation project, curated by Juana Adcock and Rahul Bery: ‘We worked by pairing Mexican and Scottish poets together. The Mexican poet translated a source text taken from the poetry collection Manca by Juana Adcock (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2014). The resulting text was then both translated into English by a literary translator, and fed through Google Translate and sent to a Scottish poet, who used this “literal version” to produce their own translation of the poem. The source texts by Juana Adcock have been lost, decaying and falling away like a perishable item cast in plaster. Or alternatively, they can be found in the pages of the above-cited book. The focus of the One-Handed project is on the process of writing as translation and viceversa.