We're pleased to announce Notes/Notas by Juan Gelman, translated by Arianna Afsari and Silvia Tandeciarz, as our Autumn 2026 Translation Choice (the87press).
Juan Gelman (1930-2014) was one of the greatest contemporary Spanish-language poets and Argentina’s Poet Laureate. He published over twenty books of poetry and won the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997); the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000); the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005); the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005); and the Premio Leteo (2012). In 2007, Gelman became the fourth Argentine to be awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious Spanish-language literary award. Alongside his lifelong commitment to leftist-political activism, Gelman worked as a journalist and a translator for the UN.
Arianna Afsari is a translator and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She examines twentieth-century Latin American guerilla poetry alongside traditions of Persian militant poetics deployed as tools of anticolonial resistance. Her translations of Juan Gelman have been published in Absinthe: World Literature in Translation (2023) and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory (2025).
Silvia R. Tandeciarz is Chancellor Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Vice Dean for Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies at William & Mary. A translator, poet, and scholar in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies, her translation work includes Masculine/Feminine (Duke University Press, 2004) and The Insubordination of Signs (Duke University Press, 2004) by the Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, and the PBS Translation Choice, Sea In My Bones (the87press, 2023) by Puerto Rican poet Juana Iris Goergen.