Invisible Dog

A selected poems in translation by one of Mexico’s leading poets, taken from five collections of verse across five decades, addressing issues of migration, duality, language loss and the mutability of identity.

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Fabio Morábito is one of Mexico’s best loved and most entertaining contemporary writers, his narratives marked by a humane irony and a philosophical resignation to the vagaries of his society and the irresistible tyrannies of time. Some of his poems make the reader laugh out loud, and Richard Gwyn’s translations are true to the tone and manner of the originals. This is the first collection of his poems to appear in English, putting right a significant omission.

The fifty-four poems in Invisible Dog were selected by the poet and translator in collaboration and draw from his five published collections spread over four decades. Readers enjoy a comprehensive introduction to his work in breadth and depth. His formal and thematic developments illuminate the wider context of modern Latin American writing, its inventive playfulness, its evasion of conventions of ‘national culture’. Morábito’s position as a poet writing in a second language contributes to his unique voice and vision. It is possible in these versions to detect elements of the poet’s ‘foreignness’ in his straightforward lexical choices, which have the effect of making the poems somehow vulnerable, as in ‘Journey to Pátzcuaro’, a sort of allegory for the immigrant experience.