Architects of the Imaginary / Los arquitectos del imaginario
Marta López-Luaces
Winner of a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award-2023
(Given by National Association of Book Entrepreneurs -NABE)
A bilingual editon (Spanish / English translation by G. J. Racz)
“Marta López-Luaces’s Architects of the Imaginary brilliantly demonstrates the practice and the truth of 'wreading' as articulated by Jed Rasula in his books This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry and On Wreading, where 'wreading' means the 'w' of writing and the act of reading conjoined. Truly, writing and reading are inseparable here. López-Luaces, in a voice both delirious and steady, orchestrates language drawn from Jabès, Duncan, Neruda, Gamoneda, H.D., Plath, Dickinson and Rosalía de Castro, among many others, such that 'Out of a foliage of words/Emily and Rosalía peak/inside me.' In the process, López-Luaces, in a world set on reductions, affirms the powers and the potentialities of the non-self-identical, which are also those of poetry itself. That this is a bilingual edition, the Spanish, and the English equally luminous, further deepens that affirmation and our encounter with wreading.”
—Leonard Schwartz, author of IF
“In Marta López-Luaces’s beautiful poetry again and again we find nature at the center of her imagination, but nature transformed into a metaphysical reality. The world and its phenomena are respected, named, and given their proper occupation. That is to say, in Architects of the Imaginary the world has found its true soul in these poems.”
—Peter Gizzi, author of Now It’s Dark
“Architects of the Imaginary by Marta López-Luaces is a book that alerts us to poetry’s subversive power and the potential writing has to interrogate us. The collection begins with a lyric essay presented as a kind of ars poetica, closing with a question that is not rhetorical, but a way of taking the reader to the very edge of language to be mobilized: ‘How can poetry exist in the face of terror?’ Each poem here is a possible answer. The author trusts in the word’s ability to repair the world through beauty and to translate as well into silences, forms, and metaphors, new means of seeing and figuring the real.”
— Eugenia Straccali, author of Medusa
Marta López-Luaces
Marta López-Luaces was born in A Coruña, Spain, in 1964, and lives in New York. She is a poet, writer and translator. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from New York University (1998). She is a professor at Montclair SU and the coordinator of the Bilingual Poetry Reading via Zoom sponsored by New York Library at Tompkins, Instituto Cervantes of New York and Montclair SU. The readings are held once a month and poets from Latin America, the United States and Spain read their poems while the translation is shown using Powerpoint. Poets like Raúl Zurita (Chile), Norma Cole (USA), Luis García Montero (USA), Ann Lauterbach (USA), Ron Sillman (USA), Peter Gizzi (USA), Jan Xie (USA), Elsa Cross (Mexico), Sandra Lorenzano (Mexico), and Rafael Saraviz (Spain), among others, have read in the series.
She has published six books of poetry: Distancias y destierros (1998), Las lenguas del viajero (Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 2005), Los arquitectos del imaginario (finalist of the prestigious award Ausiás March was published by Pre-Textos, 2011), Talar un nogal (Madrid: politea, 2015) and Después de la oscuridad (Valencia: Pre-Textos 2016). A selection of her work was translated into Romanian and published under the title Pravalirea focului (Orient-Occident, 2010). Her poetry was also translated into Italian under the title Accento Magico (San Marco, 2002). She has also published two novels and a book of short stories. Her novel, Los traductores del viento (Madrid-Monterrey: Vaso Roto, 2013) won the International Latino Book Award for Best Fantasy Novel, 2014. She was named Speaker for the Humanities of NYC (2003-05).
About the Translator
G. J. Racz is professor of Humanities at LIU Brooklyn, a past president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), and review editor for Translation Review. In addition to his nine volumes of translations of the Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos and two of the Chilean poet Óscar Hahn, Racz has published translations of dramas by Miguel Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jaime Salom, and Alberto Conejero.
