“translation and the continuum of decomposition”: Daniel Borzutzky’s Translation-Based Hemispheric Poetics

This article examines Chilean American Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry published between 2015 and 2021. Across these books, Borzutzky investigates and exposes the rotten carcass economy, a term employed in his work to signal the deep interrelation of neoliberal economic policy and systemic violence (state, imperialist, racialized). The Latinx poet blends fact and fiction by collapsing and transposing distinct geographies and eras of the neoliberal continuum of violence onto one another. Today’s Chicago becomes Pinochet’s Chile, and it stretches from the sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas to the twenty-first-century militarization of the US-Mexico border. This article seeks to articulate the relationship between these continuums and translation in Borzutzky’s work, focusing especially on its hemispheric American dimensions. The article proposes “translation-based poetics” as a theoretical framework for reading texts—like Borzutzky’s—driven by translation via a sustained interplay of theoretical, intratextual, and intertextual components. Such an examination highlights back translation, radical iterability, and hemispheric transposition of Latin American source texts as core strategies driving Borzutzky’s writing. The article seeks to model a comparative reading approach that may be applied to other texts that engage translation in monolingual dimensions and challenge the idea of national literature.