Universo 127 was originally published in 2019 by Yerba Mala Cartonera in Bolivia, and it won Lucía Carvalho the Pablo Neruda prize for young Bolivian poets that same year.
The sparse nature of Mécs’s work might make a translation superficially easier, but in reality it adds a great deal of depth and challenge—just what a translator is looking for! Her short, clipped sentences, are sometimes presented without much context, or are strung to together in one long, run-on sentence, where the scenes flicker by like pages in a flipbook.
At the entrance, a cluster of burly plants swayed in the wind. Tiny white flowers have sprung up on a pile of dead stems, and it all hums together, collapsing in on itself. Here––I’ll see it later on myself––you love plants, especially rotting or withering ones. . .
Moga woke with a heavy head, her eyes full of sleep and sari damp with sweat. Immediately she felt a strong urge to lie back next to her son on the mat and enjoy the drowsiness of that hot morning.But the thought of the cashews, which had gone unpicked for two days, made her spring to her feet. . .
it was a morning i will never forget, the morning i opened the door to the sound of them shouting,
let us march forward,
they always began with the same line,
the social scientists said of the onslaught of the sightless humans
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