Author: Vicent Moreno

This bilingual anthology of Elvira Hernández, translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher and published by Cardboard House Press, offers a comprehensive entry point into the work of the Chilean poet. The translators’ preface offers a valuable introduction that provides important context to her work and explains aspects of her poetry present in the volume, such as Hernández’s self-effacing “ethics of invisibility,” an ars poetica in which the poems stand in front while the poet hangs back, in a call to observe rather than to be observed. In this sense, Hernández has long written from the edges of Chile’s public life, partly by choice, partly by necessity: her birth name is Rosa María Teresa Adriasola Olave, but she adopted the pseudonym of Elvira Hernández under the Pinochet dictatorship.