Militant translationality and the language of the barricades: Sean Bonney in Mexican Spanish

This hybrid, creative-critical, polyvocal work presents a short selection of the late British poet Sean Bonney’s discursive prose-poetry and theory that thinks through the terms of militant poetics, in English and in the Mexican poet and translator Hugo García Manríquez’s Spanish translation, El lenguaje de las barricadas [The Language of the Barricades]. These texts are prefaced by an English-language translation of García Manríquez’s introduction to his translations. A critical postface by Militant Ecologies special issue editors Daniel Eltringham and Fred Carter contextualises these translations in terms of the twenty-first century emergence of militant ‘translationality’, suggesting that Bonney’s theorisation of both the riot-form and the counterinsurgent microclimate of sensory derangement provoked by teargas is bound up with his reluctance to consider his own versions of nineteenth-century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire as creative translations. Yet translating Bonney’s work into Latin American scenarios of struggle including Mexico, Chile and Peru allows the translational thread leading from Rimbaud and the Paris Commune – through Bonney’s work – to be woven with García Manríquez’s own recent poetry, which inflects Bonney’s riotous joy with deeper temporalities of anticolonial and indigenous revolt.