Ambassador of Nowhere

Poet and translator Richard Gwyn recalls time spent travelling Latin America, musing on the relationship between translation and travel, and how the places we visit form part of who we are.

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In Ambassador of Nowhere, Richard Gwyn takes the reader on a series of journeys across Latin America, in search of poems for his landmark anthology, The Other Tiger. He is driven through lunar landscapes in Patagonia, walks in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile and travels to a town on the Rio Magdalena that may or may not exist. From the betrayal of revolution in Nicaragua to the victims of guerrilla war in Colombia and the threat of narco gang violence in Mexico, Gwyn’s lyrical, life-affirming account pays homage to a deeply conflicted and paradoxical continent and its writers. Ambassador of Nowhere is also a book about translation, and the multiple representations of reality that the act of translation sets in motion, even as the author struggles to keep his own life on track when confronted by the demons of an earlier existence.