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 Guerrero’s work – De droom van elke cel, vertaald door Lisa Thunissen (M10Boeken) – this programme delves into the poetics of Maricela Guerrero through a focus on the word ‘becoming’ and its connection to translation. The cells she describes are endlessly becoming, they raise questions, expand the heart, they repair and support resisting femininities. Her cells reinvent the language imposed by a nameless ‘empire’, they speak in vernacular and mineral tongues.
With the poems of Maricela as the heart of the Avond, Bernke Klein Zandvoort, Jimena Casas and Lisa Thunissen interweave their reflections on the word becoming, devenir, worden. They will connect and relate it to their poetics and delve into processes of translation-as-passage: investigating the effects of transferred words and revealing the materiality of language.
The Avond oscillates within a multilingual landscape of English, Dutch, and Spanish.
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.
