El ADN DEL CANTO / THE SONG'S DNA, Yaxkin Melchy trans. Ryan Greene
El ADN del canto / The Song’s DNA comes from a larger collection called El sol verde / The Green Sun by the Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet, Yaxkin Melchy. The Green Sun is the third of five full-length books in Yaxkin's decade-long project THE NEW WORLD, written between 2007 and 2017. El ADN del canto / The Song's DNA is a selection from The Green Sun recently translated by Greene which records the growth of a poem-seed into a poem-plant over the course of three consecutive mornings. In this way, writing is imagined as an act of planting and germination, part of an effort to “locate technology within an organic vision,” reframing science as an endeavor of the heart.
Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (b. Mexico City, 1985) is a Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet, translator, ecopoetics researcher, bookmaker, and artisan-activist-editor who writes primarily in Spanish. He is the author of THE NEW WORLD, a five-part “constellation-book” which was written intermittently between 2007 and 2017. Currently he is a post-doctoral student at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, where he is researching ecopoetic currents between Japan and Latin America. Since 2017, he has been translating contemporary Japanese poetry to Spanish, and currently he runs the artisanal press Cactus del viento, which focuses on ecological, spiritual, and transpacific poetics. He also publishes on his personal blog, Flor de Amaneceres.
Ryan Greene (b. 1994) is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona who is currently working with Yaxkin Melchy to translate the first three books of THE NEW WORLD. He's a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include work by Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has co-facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras BilingualBookstore. Like Collier, the ground he stands on is not his ground.
El ADN DEL CANTO / THE SONG'S DNA, Yaxkin Melchy trans. Ryan Greene. Dos-a-dos chapbook (Spanish & English). 24pp each, saddle-stitch bound. 4.66" x 8.5". First edition printing of 225. Covers printed on Kraft speckled card stock, interiors printed on French natural text weight paper. Printed and assembled in "Kingston, New York,” the unceded and occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke tribes. Designed by The Aliens.
