Stolen Flower, by Irma Pineda, will be published in a trilingual edition by Yale University Press. (Soon, you will be able to preorder it here.) This collection originally appeared in Mexico, in a bilingual Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec) and Spanish edition, in 2013. Some of the translations included in it have appeared in U.S. literary journals (please see links below).
This collection is a novel-in-poems, based on true events. In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked on her farm. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, including eyewitness accounts, the courts ruled that Ascencio had died of natural causes. When journalists began to investigate, they discovered that there were numerous girls in the community who also had been raped by soldiers—girls as young as twelve who were already mothers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over violence against women and girls, violence against Indigenous communities, and military impunity. Stolen Flower makes art from that horrific series of events.
I am grateful to Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities and the University of Iowa’s MFA in Literary Translation for supporting my English translation of this book. Irma Pineda and I shared the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize for Poetry Translation for three poems from this book that were published by Poetry.
You can read individual poems included in the collection in several literary journals. Please see links below:
Three poems at Poetry: in English (see links at bottom of that page) and the bilingual originals, with a short Translator’s Note
Three poems at Adi Magazine: rehumanizing policy