The Indigenous Writing Project: Contemporary Guaraní Poetry

Our July 2020 issue of contemporary Guaraní-language poetry marks the first installment in WWB's Indigenous Writing Project, an ongoing series that seeks to publish writers working in the world's many indigenous languages in direct translation into English. Though we have published indigenous literature throughout our seventeen-year history, the Indigenous Writing Project marks a sustained effort by the magazine to increase recognition of indigenous writers in the Anglophone world. In this effort, we have engaged experts and informants to ensure that literatures that live beyond the confines of Western culture are not unduly rendered through its prism or subjected to colonialist and nationalist discourses that seek to evaluate a literature's worth in juxtaposition to writing expressed in the dominant language of the country or region from which it comes. Our advisors allow us to publish translations directly from indigenous languages into English and ensure that in so doing we respect the nuances particular to indigenous worldviews or to the frequently oral nature of these literatures.  
WWB would like to thank Susy Delgado, Alba Eiragi Duarte, and Miguelángel Meza for their translations from the Guaraní into Spanish and Delgado for her work as a cultural consultant providing expertise during the translation process. We also express our gratitude to translators Tracy K. Lewis, Susan Smith Nash, and Elisa Taber for their English translations from the original Guaraní.