The Space Between the Words: A Brief Mapping of the Translation of Eavan Boland’s Poetry in Mexico

Abstract

Eavan Boland is without a doubt one of Ireland’s most prestigious and best-known poets—her fame has transcended the geo-cultural limits of the phenomenon known as “Irish literature,” and indeed, over the course of the past two decades, it has overcome, through translation, the linguistic boundaries of the Anglosphere. In spite of the considerable dissemination of Boland’s work, both in prose and verse, all over the Western world, the Spanish language has been somewhat remiss in receiving and translating her oeuvre. In the Hispanophone Americas, Boland’s verse has been translated sparsely for either anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry or literary magazines directing attention to her accomplishments as a writer who is “representative” of her national tradition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This article will trace some of the (translational) pathways that Boland has travelled in Mexico, one of the cultural hubs of Spanish-speaking America, where Eva Cruz’s Anthology / Antología remains the only single-author volume of Boland’s poetry in translation.