Award-winning poets Lara Dopazo Ruibal and Laura Cesarco Eglin will visit Illinois State University on February 3 to discuss Dopazo Ruibal’s poetry collection claus and the scorpion (co•im•press, 2022) and give a bilingual reading from the book. Written in Galician and translated into English by Cesarco Eglin, claus and the scorpion was just longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation. The author and translator team will take part in PubUnit Presents, a two-part event series centered on embracing the interdisciplinary English studies model of the English department by bringing in writers who are also editors, and who often embody additional literary and educational roles. This event series is hosted by the Publications Unit in the Department of English.
Both of the PubUnit Presents events will be held on Friday, February 3, at University Galleries, with the option to attend virtually via Zoom (registration required for virtual attendance, see links below). At 1 p.m., Dopazo Ruibal and Cesarco Eglin will be in conversation with Dr. Steve Halle, director of the Publications Unit, about their roles as writer and translator in conjunction with their shared experiences as editors and educators and Cesarco Eglin’s role as co-founder of Veliz Books, an independent literary press. There will be a question-and-answer period afterward.
The second part of the event will take place at 6 p.m. and will be a bilingual reading from claus and the scorpion. The reading will be followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing. Books will be available to purchase at the event, or you can purchase a copy from the publisher. Both events are free and open to the public. If you plan to attend virtually, please register for each event separately:
In poems brimming with achingly vivid and terrifyingly beautiful imagery, Dopazo Ruibal interrogates the shattering responses to trauma and violence as they threaten and intrude upon the precarious “safe haven.”
About claus and the scorpion
Winner of the 2017 Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize, one of the most prestigious awards bestowed for Galician poetry, and recently longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation, claus and the scorpion is the fearsome and feral first book of poetry by Lara Dopazo Ruibal to appear in English, translated by the award-winning literary polymath Laura Cesarco Eglin. In poems brimming with achingly vivid and terrifyingly beautiful imagery, Dopazo Ruibal interrogates the shattering responses to trauma and violence as they threaten and intrude upon the precarious “safe haven.” Using three distinct speakers—lara, the scorpion, claus—as vantage points to explore and express the complexity of interiority, Dopazo Ruibal grapples with profuse internal and external forces that painfully shape and reshape a soul even as they threaten a sense of belonging, a cohesive self-concept, and, ultimately, annihilation. claus and the scorpion starts with the resolute calm of the ever-present sea and moves readers to the mercurial forge where fire shapes anew or lays waste, and in this movement, these poems disrupt the desire to return to an idyllic and unattainable past, attacking language’s layers and fissures to put pressure on its most enigmatic dualisms: the sublime and the monstrous, the monumental and the mundane, renewal and decay, fragility and strength. Cesarco Eglin translates these poems into stark, mesmerizing English verses, using her nimble eye and deft poet’s ear to render Dopazo Ruibal’s spare, crystalline original. A singular and spellbinding force majeure, Dopazo Ruibal’s claus and the scorpion will make you “stop breathing and break / very slowly / the seams that hold [your] chest together.”
About the author
Lara Dopazo Ruibal is an award-winning poet, author, and editor from Marín (Galicia, Spain). Dopazo Ruibal has published four poetry collections, and she is the co-editor and co-author of the experimental essay volume A través das marxes: Entrelazando feminismos, ruralidades e comúns (Bartlebooth, 2017). Her poetry collection claus e o alacrán (Espiral Maior, 2018) was awarded the Fiz Vergara Vilariño Prize in 2017, one of the most prestigious poetry competitions in the Galician language; and her collection ovella (Concello de Outes, 2016) was awarded the Francisco Añón Prize in 2015. Dopazo Ruibal was a resident artist at the Spanish Royal Academy in Rome for the academic year 2018/2019. She won the Illa Nova Narrative Award with her short story collection O axolote e outros contos de bestas e auga (Editorial Galaxia, 2020). Dopazo Ruibal has a B.A. in journalism and two master’s degrees: one in international cooperation and one in theoretical and practical philosophy.
About the translator
Laura Cesarco Eglin is an award-winning translator and poet from Uruguay. She serves as assistant professor of creative writing and interim director of the Cultural Enrichment Center at the University of Houston-Downtown, and she is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books, an independent literary press dedicated to publishing works of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and books in translation. Most recently, she is the translator from the Galician of Lara Dopazo Ruibal’s claus and the scorpion (co•im•press, 2022). Additionally, she is the translator from the Portuguese of Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes (co•im•press, 2018), which won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry, and she is the co-translator from the Portuñol of Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books, 2020). Her translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician have appeared in a variety of journals, including Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, Eleven Eleven, The Massachusetts Review, and Cordella Magazine among others. Cesarco Eglin is the author of six poetry collections, including Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254, 2022); Life, One Not Attached to Conditionals (Thirty West Publishing House, 2020); Reborn in Ink (trans. Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval; The Word Works, 2019); Calling Water by Its Name (trans. Scott Spanbauer; Mouthfeel Press, 2016); and Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate (The Lune, 2015). Cesarco Eglin holds an M.A. in English language and literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an M.F.A. in bilingual creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from the University of Colorado Boulder.
The event is sponsored by Harold K. Sage Foundation; the Illinois State University Foundation Fund; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the Publications Unit in the Department of English.
For additional information, contact Holms Troelstrup, assistant director of the Publications Unit, at jhtroel@IllinoisState.edu or (309) 438-3025. Follow the Publications Unit on Twitter @PubUnit_ISU and on Instagram @PubUnit.
