The Dream of Every Cell
Encouraging is a rounded and warm way of resisting, writes Maricela Guerrero in her poetry collection El sueño de toda célula (Ediciones Antilope, 2018). Becoming a cell that dreams of becoming a cell.
Celebrating the Dutch translation of El sueño de toda célula, De droom van elke cel (M10 uitgevers, 2025, by Lisa Thunnissen), this programme delves into the poetics of Mexican contemporary poet Maricela Guerrero, focusing on the word becoming and its connection to the process of translation. A selection of her poems appeared in latest issue of Terras 26: MAGIA/NO MAGIA.
Becoming a cell is an act of remembering in Guerrero’s poems. Inside her writing, cells participate in our collective desires and weave webs of relation. They stir the heart, they question, they articulate the violent processes of deforestation, subtraction, and extraction, they mend. Her language is rooted in care — in the connections among living organisms and ourselves, in acts of resistance and protest. Cells speak in vernacular and mineral tongues, reinventing the language imposed by a nameless empire.
With Guerrero’s poems at the heart of the program, Bernke Klein Zandvoort, Jimena Casas, and Lisa Thunnissen interweave their reflections on the word becoming – devenir – worden. They relate it to their own poetics and explore the process of translation, observing how words in passage between tongues reveal the materiality of language.
The Avond oscillates within a multilingual landscape of English, Dutch, and Spanish.
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Maricela Guerrero (1977) writes poems and sometimes prose. Desde las ramas una guacamaya (2006) was her debut. Up to now she has published eleven books of poetry. For El sueño de toda célula (2018) she received the Mexican poetry prize Premio Clemencia Isaura de Poesía. Her work has been translated into English, French, German and Swedish, and, very recently, into Dutch.
Lisa Thunnissen (1984) translates mostly Latin American authors. For her first book translation De cowboykampioen (2017) by Aura Xilonen she was nominated for the Filter Vertaalprijs and in 2021 she received the Charlotte Köhler Stipendium.
Bernke Klein Zandvoort is a writer and artist. She keeps being curious about how we get to know and shape the world through the lenses of words. She views text as a material and is interested in the porosity between text and image, and in translation as a multiplier of perception. Her poetry collections Uitzicht is een afstand die zich omkeert (Querido, 2013) and Veldwerk (Querido, 2020) got nominated for and awarded with several Dutch prizes. At the moment, she is working on her first non-fiction book, Oogsprong, which will be published spring 2026.
