Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems

Tatiana Oroño (San José, Uruguay, 1947) is Uruguayan poet, writer and teacher. She is the author of nine books including Libro de horas (2017), Estuario (2015), La Piedra Nada Sabe (2008), Morada móvil (2004) , El alfabeto verde (1979) and two French editions of her work, Tout fut ce qui ne fut pas/ Todo tuvo la forma que no tuvo (2004), translated by Laura Masello, and Ce qu’il faut dire a des fissures (2012), translated by Madeleine Stratford. Naturaleza muerta con derrotas/ Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño’s poetry. In 2009, Oroño won the Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize in Poetry and the Morosoli Prize for Poetry, two of the most important Uruguayan literary prizes. Her poems have been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Spain, France, and Mexico and, translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval, in literary magazines such as American Poetry Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, Stand, Western Humanities Review, and World Literature Today.Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her books include the poetry collection America that island off the coast of France, winner of the Dorset Prize, The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She was a NEA Translation Fellow. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren, and Reborn in Ink by Laura Cesarco Eglin, co-translated with Catherine Jagoe. She is currently the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In “Elegy for the Road,” Tatiana Orono writes, “Poetry is the place where the things go that have no solution.” Her book, Still Life with Defeats, provides the solution I didn’t know I needed. What gratitude I feel to Jesse Lee Kercheval for this inspired translation. Without it, we’d be bereft of Orono’s taut, compelling poems, rich with sly surprise and haunting imagery. —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. NortonTatiana Oroño’s place amid the motherlines of Uruguayan and Latin American poetry is beyond dispute; in Kercheval’s English translations, Oroño’s svelte lyrics are revealed to be in conversation with a litany of English-language poets writing before and alongside her, from Emily Dickinson to Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe to Cathy Wagner. This is the poetry of cosmic concentration, in which any object, any syllable, no matter how domestic or mundane, becomes a doorway on the Infinite by being so resolutely itself. —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion GrenadeTatiana Oroño's Still Life With Defeats is, like all good poetry, an attempted response to those questions that seem unanswerable. A search for unity underpins these poems, a quest for ultimate meaning, but, as in a still life painting of varied objects, there remains a gulf that cannot be bridged, a chasm that is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful. These poems represent an ongoing movement toward finding the connection and wholeness shared by all living things. Translator Jesse Lee Kercheval has joyfully accompanied the author on this journey; uniting passion with precision, she preserves the dazzling complexity of the original while continuing to ask the questions that have no easy answers. —Jeannine Pitas, translator of I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio