The plumed horn / El corno emplumado: poetry, translation and subversion

In this essay, I study the importance of translation as a means of subversion through the bilingual literary magazine El Corno emplumado / The plumed horn. The journal was published in Mexico City in 1962 and ran for seven and a half years, until 1969. The editors and poets, Sergio Mondragón and Margaret Randall, wrote, translated, edited, and founded 31 volumes in total. It was a bilingual trimester publication—spanish/english—, of art and literature. Among the many objectives that the editors had were the ability to create a cultural exchange between the Spanish speaking countries and the English ones; to spread the pacifist ideas of the time, which came from a marked social conscience; and to translate unknown poetry from the entire American continent to inform its readers of the realities that oppressed nations by dictatorial governments, were going through. It is the case of the poem “America” by beat poet Allen Ginsberg and “México: xixth Olympiad” by the Nobel prize winner Octavio Paz, which I analyze in the text.