Scenes Left Out Of […]

Description

Efraín Velasco

Mark Statman

Scenes Left Out Of […]

978-1-956921-66-3 (pbk.)

122 pages: $19.95
March 1, 2026

Efraín Velasco’s Scenes Left Out Of […] takes on old tropes—children’s stories/fairy tales— ideas of aesthetics—and teaches them new tricks. Kicking off with Grumpy, Goldlilocks, Red Riding Hood, and Peter Pan, he moves on to examinations of poetry, Renaissance art, literary rituals, and lovemaking. And the poems here are those poems that weren’t written, wouldn’t have been written, couldn’t have been. Because if they had? They’d have been unwritten. Deleted. Erased. Out of necessity. Self-preservation. Survival.

Yet here they are. They also aren’t. Scenes Left Out Of […] isn’t the book Velasco originally wrote. That book, Escenas Eliminadas […], in the process of translation, disappeared. That is, in translation, the translation lost. As Velasco and fellow poet Mark Statman began to find the poems in English, a new book of poems was created. Constructed. One which resembled the original and became so new and different, the first book no longer mattered. It had become irrelevant.

As the poets write in their prologue: Sometimes a poetry translation becomes something else. Something different. It ceases to be what the poet expects, what the translator meant. And then what is it? Then what does it mean?

This continual astonishment of deep imagination translations upsets both temporal and global positioning. Borges is whispering your childhood fairy tales, Mexico City was founded by Walt Disney, and Mami’s lullabies don’t lull no more. Velasco/Statman  transport you to where you’ve never been before. And with poetry, that’s exactly where you want to be. 

—Bob Holman

In Scenes Left Out Of […] Efraín Velasco pushes the ideas of fairy tale story characters so far from the shores of their originals, they become something else. Gretel is an inside out hurricane, part bird, part starry sky, existing at “the end of this and other worlds”; Peter Pan, a shadow that “long ago abandoned the green of the plain”, Goldilocks, a “landscape” “gilding the lily in gold”.  In these poems, such familiar characters and others slip from their stories to float in a multiverse alongside various typographical symbols. This is a book e.e. cummings might relish, as would Albert Einstein and Lewis Carroll. Polymaths, meet poetry. Poetry, meet abstract expressionism.

If translation can be seen as one part interpretation, one part vandalism, as is suggested in the Rauschenberg quote at the beginning of this collection, then Mark Statman has taken the act to a new level, in visiting and also reinventing the poems of Oaxaca poet Efrain Velasco. These poems are more than translations, they are collaborative experiments. They are transmogrifications.

—Elizabeth Cohen