The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts

Special Guest Judge, Natasha Wimmer:

At first glance, “Magkano?” comes across as a classic protest poem, calling out injustices in a series of eloquent questions in English and Filipino. The rhythmic, resonant lines beg to be read out loud. But once the reader delves a little deeper, complexities and contradictions complicate the message. Fish must be cheap, but fishermen must make enough to feed their families; repeated words mean one thing and then another (“How much for a body that works? How much to leave work…?” The narrator (“dual citizen of crisis”) juggles languages and identities, seeming to speak simultaneously from two places: a country of the oppressed and a country of oppressors (“My country is sick./My country is the one/making it sick”). And the final line jolts the reader out of any lingering complacency, turning the poem on its head. This is a many-layered, provocative poem that makes striking use of two languages.

Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her most recent translations are The Twilight Zone and Voyager, by Nona Fernández, and You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue. She began her career in publishing, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and has also worked as a book review editor. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. She teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University, and she is the recipient of a PEN Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.