they view a business across the street, or
searching through a box of crumpled old
photographs, or introducing you to the dog
who will turn up years later in some cryptic
text.”
Another writer Dykstra has translated
is Juan Carlos Flores, a very particular kind
of writer who never joined the uneac, the
government-run Cuban writer and artist
union. Flores, as Dykstra explains, “was
known for sometimes caustic resistance to
all manners of institutionality (a trait that
could translate past Cuba).” Of Flores, she
translated The Counterpunch (and Other
Horizontal Poems). He wasn’t exactly well
known in Cuba and was one of the writers
Cuba might have erased if it weren’t for the
power of translation.
In fact, the book Dykstra translated
might not have been published by the state
presses at all in Cuba if Reina María Rodrí-
guez hadn’t done it herself first, using her
own very small press, Torre de Letras. “Upon
his death, Juan Carlos was not granted spe-
cial funerary recognition for his contribu-
tions to literature, despite a request from his
friends,” says Dykstra. He would definitely
not be known outside the island if it weren’t
for Rodríguez and for Dykstra herself.
“Overall, there has been nothing as dra-
matic as the Padilla case or the more recent
activity around [the artist] Tania Bruguera,”
says Dykstra, “yet everything I’ve translated
has some degree of critical speech in it....
One can’t always guess when a writer will be
perceived as crossing a line between accept-
able and unacceptable criticism.”
At least if some of these writers can’t be
read in Cuba, there is hope in what Cubans
everywhere call el exterior—in that diaspora
which boomerangs right back to the island,
sometimes missing, but sometimes mak-
ing a full return, despite obstacles. When
words sit free on a page, there is always hope
that, as Kushner says, entering another per-
son’s point of view will teach us something.
Cumulatively it tells us the Cuban story,
and, broader still, it helps us piece together
our collective human thread.
MiamiRob Vollmar’s Summer Reads
Book Review and Online Editor Rob Vollmar is expecting to spend wide swaths of
Oklahoma’s usually sweltering summer developing methodologies for measuring agri-
cultural and social sustainability but has these works ready to slot into any pause in
the action.Bill McKibben
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to
Play Itself Out?Henry HoltBill McKibben has been on the forefront of reportage
and deep thought on the converging crises that confront
the human race in the century at hand. His latest book,
Falter, sounds a more dire note as political solutions
seem distant and social fabrics across the world buckle
under the strain.Jem Bendell
Deep Adaptation: A Map for
Navigating Climate Tragedyhttp://www.inflas.infoJem Bendell, a respected academic in the field of
sustainable development, raised eyebrows in 2018
when he independently published this somber paper
declaring that social collapse was both imminent and
inevitable. Bendell proposes a multitier strategy for
coping with the dramatic upheaval that would ensue but concedes that climate
catastrophe is now unavoidable.Joanna Macy & Molly Brown
Coming Back to Life: The Updated
Guide to the Work That ReconnectsNew SocietyJoanna Macy has been conducting workshops for
decades with the intention of reconnecting people to
the damage being wrought by the human program of
permanent industrial growth. In Coming Back to Life,
she, along with co-writer Molly Brown, offers written
versions of those workshops as well as insights crafted
to allow people to move past eco-despair and into motivated action on behalf of the
natural system being dismantled.SUMMER READSWORLDLIT.ORG 35