FIAT LUX by Paula Abramo translated by Dick Cluster
Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book of poetry by a writer under 40, is a collection evoking the poet’s ancestors who were political refugees from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century, and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico in later eras. At the same time, it is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination. The hinge connecting the two themes is the recurring image of striking a match. (Abramo’s grandmother worked in a match factory in Brazil producing the brand called Fiat Lux, Latin for “let there be light.”)
Paula Abramo was born in Mexico City in 1980. She earned a degree in Classical Languages and Literatures, has been awarded two poetry fellowships by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, and been an invited to literary festivals and conferences in Brazil, Colombia, Sweden, Argentina, Portugal, France, Cuba, Germany, and Slovakia. Her poem cycle FIAT LUX won the 2013 Premio de Poesías Joaquín Xirau Icaza for the best book by a writer under 40. Her poems have been selected for anthologies of contemporary Mexican and worldwide poetry, both in Spanish and in translation to Portuguese, German, and French, and appeared in journals in the U.S., Central and South America, and Europe.
Abramo’s prolific work as a translator of some fifty books from Portuguese includes work by Angélica Freitas, Clarice Lispector, and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Brazil) and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andreson (Portugal). She co-authored Yo soy la otra : las mujeres y la cultura en México (2017) and the art installation Ropa Sucia (2017), exposing the causes of the invisibility of Mexican female writers and artists.
Dick Cluster is a writer and translator in Oakland, California. Translations published in 2022 include Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux (FlowerSong Press), Gabriela Alemán’s Family Album (City Lights Books), and poetry by Pedro de Jesús (Asymptote Journal). He is the author of a crime novel series featuring car mechanic Alex Glauberman (reissued in 2015 by booksbnimble.com) and co-author, with Rafael Hernández, of History of Havana, a social history of the Cuban capital (OR Books, 2018). He also translates scholarly work from the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, and Spain.
Praise for
FIAT LUX
Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo is a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.
— Lucia Duero, Words Without Borders
There are those who think that in the beginning came light and the transparent word. In Fiat Lux—a book as dazzling as a match at the moment of ignition—Paula Abramo shows that in the beginning came translation and exile, friction and chiaroscuro. And she does this with a musicality, verbal imagination, educated humor and historical and political consciousness rarely seen in her generation, or in any other.
— Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, author of 50 estados: 13 poetas and Lyric Poetry is Dead
Paula Abramo renders enormities—exile, prison, geography, industrial chemistry—with sinuous precision. Here is a powerful sense of lives lived at the behest of various forces—economic, political, corporate—yet free in the deep, explicit sense of a hand striking a match. The sheer dynamism of this collection casts a steady, inventive spell.
— Baron Wormser, author of Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems and Legends of the Slow Explosion
The writing in Fiat Lux confirms the good news: the opening of new channels in Mexican poetry after years of stagnation.
— La Tempestad, Mexico City
One of the best collections by young authors in recent years, highly polished poetry that takes up the most concrete things without ever becoming prosaic, that joins classical references with the most contemporary poetics while effortlessly displaying an enormous range of expressive resources.
— Elsa Cross, author of Jaguar, Espirales and winner of Mexico’s Xavier Villurrutia Prize
Fiat Lux is poetry of high quality in its minute attention to detail, its exploration of the possibility of language, and an original poetic voice that explores lyricism without relying on ‘elevated’ conventions of diction or tone.
— Paulo da Luz Moreira, Caracol, University of São Paulo.
Paula Abramo’s Fiat Lux—a mesmerizing exploration of the borders between languages, countries, generations, and histories both epic and intimate in scope—is among the most remarkable works in contemporary Mexican poetry. And Dick Cluster’s English translation of these rich and intricate poems makes me want to stand up and cheer: it crackles, glimmers, sings. Together, poet and translator bring us a breathtaking polyphony, a thousand lit matches, a radiance that changes and grows with every read.
— Robin Myers, poet & translator, author of Having/Tener and Else/Lo demás, translator of Cristina Rivera Garza and Andrés Neuman
By illuminating, like the match’s flame, the instant’s contour in the fog of time, this subtle book—the best poetry book I’ve read in many years—reveals more than what it suggests and suggests more than what it reveals. — Pedro Poitevin, Salem State University, author of Perplejidades After reading this amazing, unique and mind-blowing little book, readers will think differently about words like pain or identity or family. Paula Abramo proves that there are territories where only poetry can take us.
— Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet and Multiple Choice