cover design by Eliana P. Benavides Villegas
cover art by Pedro Nel Gomez
photograph of cover illustration by Edwin Gomez Mesa

Sidney Wade, professor at the University of Florida and author of Stroke says:  “Margarita Millar has done María Mercedes Carranza the inestimable service of bringing her Canto de las Moscas into musical, faithful, and quietly resonant English. The poems ring like bells from the center of the destruction that engendered them and then echo into an almost unbearable stillness. These sensitive translations will enrich and inevitably sadden anyone who reads them.”
Carranza, a tireless peace activist, believed in the power of poems to heal and change a country which has suffered unspeakable levels of cruelty. In 2001 she wrote: “…I want to talk about the power of the word against chaos and horror; there is a need to replace bullets for words … I want to talk about poetry–well–as a weapon to affirm and impose life and love: against death, there is life.”

 

The publishing house Freedom Voices releases a bilingual edition of Song of the Flies/El canto de las moscas,  the last book the Colombian poet and journalist María Mercedes Carranza published before committing suicide in 2003. The 24 short poems in this book, named after villages where massacres took place in the rural areas of Colombia, are a poetic chronicle of these tragedies. Margarita Millar translates these lyric works with powerful images of ravaged nature and landscape, the aftermath of devastation, to provide a glimpse of the brutality the civilian population endures in that country. The book has been nominated for this year’s Northern California Book Award in Translation.