Word of the Deceased by Jonathan Estrada

Description

This book reflects the implosion of the city towards another immensity. Here the whole city is submerging under the mega-tsunami of poetic configuration. Everywhere increasing the murmur of zero, echoing in its corners and binary walls, beneath the appearance, the prairie of antennae, the semi-formal life that evaporates with the calm of shipping and receiving. In this semi-real —therefore, false— world of screens where each one is a cosmos, in all the psychic and material walls, the poet sees temples in rubble, churches in ashes and demolished cathedrals. With vigorously piercing images, with constant verbal power, with lively phosphorescent adjectives, he has discovered, and at the same time created, a much less imaginary city than the “real” one. He conjures a terrible and transcendent poetic city, an original plane, a fortune of reality, an immensity, a plain immensity. That is Jonathan Estrada’s line of flight. Around the corner, the flight. — José Pancorvo

Jonathan Estrada (Palomino city, Lima. 1984); after passing through the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM), he published his first collection of poems, Solobones (2008) followed by Palabra de Occiso (Word of the Deceased, 2013). He has also ventured into the musical field with the albums: Endechas (2013); Ruma (2016), El fin de la infancia (The end of Childhood, 2019) and Dársena (EP, 2020), and has performed in different venues and cultural centers in Lima. He musicalized the plays A-LAS de Lata (electric version), Niebla, El soldado y la muerte, and Entreluz by Hildy Quintanilla, and toured with the MASHARA theatre company in presentations in Uruguay (Perimetral Theater Festival, 2016) and Argentina. Along with Stefani Acosta, he was one of the founders and managers of the CASA FELA cultural center (2017-2019) in the Historic Centre of Lima, where he hosted music, poetry and theatre performances, as well as all kinds of collective events. He currently wanders around and listens to the city and the outskirts of Lima…

Gustavo Gómez Yamasaki (Lima, 1984), is an Anthropologist graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and a minor in History. He has worked as a freelance translator for over 5 years and his work has been featured in the “Mexico Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990” exhibition catalogue for assisting in translations at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. He lives and works in Lima, Peru. This is his first published translation.