LEOPOLDO CASTILLA

Translated by James Byrne and Isabella Castañeda Godoy

I fi rst met Leopoldo Castilla in at Paralelo Cero festival in Quito, Ecuador in 2017. Anyone who knew him well would refer to him by another name (‘Teuco’, meaning river – a nickname given to him when he was a child by his father, the poet Manuel J. Castilla). Leopoldo and I got on straight away and I remember, with the help of other poets at the festival, translating a short poem of his about Hamlet onto a napkin. Of course the napkin has since disappeared, but I remember being impressed by Leopoldo’s work immediately. He is both complex and humane. An activist poet, keen to fi ght for the survival of the world.

Leopoldo and I kept in touch and met again this summer in his hometown of Buenos Aires, in La Paz café where the Argentinian poets used to meet. A picture of Borges hung on the wall, someone known to Leopoldo before he self-exiled to Spain, to avoid being part of ‘the disappeared’ in Argentina, at a time when many writers, artists and intellectuals were systematically kidnapped and killed by their own government.

By the time of my reunion with him, Isabella and I had made translations of several of Leopoldo’s poems. Because of her expertise with Spanish and poetic ear, I insisted Isabella decide which poems she’d like to translate and, fortunately (despite its translational diffi culty – the threat of human extinction unrelenting despite an abundance of metaphor), she selected the long work ‘Never’ (Nunca), one of his signature poems, alongside ‘Natives and Tourists’ (Indios y Turistas), both published here for the fi rst time in English.

Thanks to Isabella for her care and diligence. Thanks also to the poet and partner of Leopoldo, Maria Casiraghi, who off ered us useful comments on the initial translations of these poems, and of course to Teuco himself, one of Argentina’s greatest living poets.

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