Plagios/Plagiarisms: The Final Translation (The Extended Version)

Plagios/PlagiarismsVolume III is the final installment in a trilogy by local translators that brings the complete works of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León into English for the first time. This is the extended version of the article that ran in the North Bay Bohemian.

By Kary Hess

Translator and educator Nancy Morales didn’t expect a former student’s invitation to join a literary translation project to blossom into a multi-book endeavor.

But it did—and over the next several years, Morales and her former student John Johnson, joined by the former Sonoma County Poet Laureate Terry Ehret, began creating Plagios, a comprehensive trilogy of dual-language volumes that bring the complete works of Mexican poet Ulalume González de León into English for the first time.

Johnson remembered Morales using poetry in class to connect students more deeply with language, so he asked if she was interested in translating some of González de León’s work. Her previous translation experience had been primarily academic, but this project would be an artistic endeavor. Meanwhile, Ehret was already regularly using González de León’s work in her creative writing classes. She had first read the poet’s work as a graduate student at San Francisco State.

“I was intrigued by the way she combined a highly sensual language with philosophical and scientific diction,” says Ehret, who often used the Mexican poet’s series of prose poems Anatomy of Love, in her classes. When she looked for more of González de León’s poems in English, she found there was very little and ended up trying her own hand at translation.

Translators Terry Ehret, Nancy Morales, and John Johnson.

When Johnson contacted Ehret for recommendations on where he and Morales might publish their first translations, Ehret joined the project.

“The [three volume project] was Terry’s idea,” says Johnson, “I called her one day after Nancy and I had translated a few of [González de León’s] poems, to ask if she’d help us get them published in a journal somewhere.” he recalls, “How many poems did Terry have in mind? All of them! And along with publishing in journals, Terry suggested that we publish all of them together in a three-volume, bilingual edition.”

The project was shaped by a commitment to preserving González de León’s voice while making her poetry accessible to a new audience. It would also be the first time that the Mexican poet’s collected published work would be available in a dual-language format.

But it was a project that almost didn’t happen.