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Irma Pineda is an Isthmus Zapotec poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She has two previous collections of poetry in Wendy Call’s English translation: In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. Wendy Call is a writer, editor, translator, and educator. She is the author of No Word for Welcome and coeditor of Telling True Stories and the annual Best Literary Translations. She lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land.“A shocking book about a terrifying event, seen through the sharp and observant eyes of Mexican poet and activist Irma Pineda.”—María Baranda, author of <i>The New World Written</i><br /><br />“Irma Pineda’s incantatory collection speaks truth to power in a voice that is prophetic, haunting, and hallucinatory, yet always brimming with humane compassion. Call’s translations are translucent and cutting as glass, offering these poems that already live in twinned bodies of Didxazá and Spanish the clear-eyed vision of a third.”—Michael Bazzett, translator of <i>If Today Were Tomorrow, </i>selected poems of Humberto Ak’abal<br /><br />“Irma Pineda’s poetry is urgent, at once fierce and full of compassion. It brings us face to face with our times, denouncing the violence that so often tears our communities apart, and envisioning alternative futures as only poetry can. And what a treat has Yale University Press prepared for multilingual readers worldwide. Long live translators, who, like Wendy Call, open paths for solidarity and awe.”—Cristina Rivera Garza, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of <i>Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice</i><br /><br />“Childhood, her original memory, and her words are powerful ingredients in Irma, the poet, the woman, the human being, who reminds us how important it is not to forget our roots to survive.”—Juan Carlos Rulfo, documentary filmmaker<br /><br />“Pineda’s voice, ancestral echoes intertwined, stands forward with a timely poetic proposal on atrocities against Indigenous people. She builds sensitive tension in Zapotec, her tongue. Earthy, painful yet luminous. Never shy.”—Julia Santibáñez, winner of the Mario Benedetti International Poetry Award<br /><br />
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her cornfield. The courts ruled that Ascencio died of natural causes. When journalists investigated, they discovered numerous village girls, as young as twelve, who also had been raped by soldiers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over gender-based violence, oppression of Indigenous communities, and military impunity.
Stolen Flower is Irma Pineda’s powerful sequence of poems memorializing these events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.