Giannina Braschi
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Cutting-edge poet and novelist Giannina Braschi (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 5, 1953) is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel, "YO-YO BOING!" (1998). "For decades, Dominican and Puerto Rican authors have carried out a linguistic revolution," noted The Boston Globe, and "Giannina Braschi, especially in her novel YO-YO BOING!, testify to it."
Giannina Braschi moved to New York in the mid-1970s after studying literature in universities in Madrid, Rome, Paris, and London. She obtained a PhD from the State University of New York, Stony Brook (1980) in Peninsula Studies. Her early writings were scholarly in nature and focused on the titans of Spanish and Latin American literature. She published a book on the Spanish Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Becquer and essays on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Vallejo, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and Garcia Lorca.
In the 1980s, she burst onto the downtown Nuyorican poetry scene with high-voltage performances of rhythmic intensity, humorous gusto, and anti-imperialistic politics. The postmodern poetry dreamscapeEMPIRE OF DREAMS (Yale University Press, 1994) and the bilingual experimental novel YO-YO BOING! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998) are her best known titles. The Review of Contemporary Fiction described the bilingual novel as a "synergetic fusion that marks in a determinant fashion the lived experiences of U. S. Hispanics." Her Spanish titles include EL IMPERIO DE LOS SUENOS (Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1999, 2nd edition; Anthropos Editorial, Barcelona, 1988, 1st edition), LA COMEDIA PROFANA (Anthropos Editorial, Barcelona, 1985), and ASALTO AL TIEMPO (Ambitos Literario, Barcelona, 1980). She has won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, New York Foundation for the Arts, El Diario La Prensa, Reed Foundation, PEN American Center, and Instituto de Cultura Puertoriquena.
Poet and feminist scholar Alicia Ostriker wrote in the introduction to Giannina Braschi's EMPIRE OF DREAMS that Braschi's poetry has "sheer erotic energy that defies definition and dogma(Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994)."
Giannina Braschi noted in an article published in The Evergreen Review that she considers herself "more French than Beckett, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein" and believes that she is the "granddaughter of Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud, bastard child of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, half-sister to Heiner Müller, kissing cousin of Tadeus Kantor, and lover of Witkiewicz"(www.evergreenreview.com).
Excerpts of her work have appeared in French, Italian, Swedish, Russian, and Serbian translations. Her collected poetry was translated into English by Tess O'Dwyer, who won the Columbia University Translation Center Award in 1991 for her rendition of EMPIRE OF DREAMS, which inaugurated the Yale Library of World Literature in Translation. Literary journals that have published Tess O'Dwyer's translations include: The Best of Review: Art and Literature of the Americas, Agni, Ars Interpres International, Dickinson Review, Callaloo, Artful Dodge, The Evergreen Review, Prose Poem, and Poet Magazine. Scholars who have illuminated her texts include Jean Franco, Francine Masiello, Ilan Stavans, Julio Ortega, Laura Loustau, Daniela Daniele, Maria Mercedes Carrion, Cristina Garrigos, Francisco Jose Ramos, and Doris Sommer.
Giannina Braschi is working on a politically-charged collection of essays on the fall of the American empire, tentatively entitled: HAMLET AND SEGISMUNDO. The work narrates her experiences during the collapse of the World Trade Center--the event which displaced her from the Battery Park nieghborhood that became known as the Ground Zero vicinity. Publisher Barney Rossett, founder of Grove Press and The Evergreen Review, said of Giannina Braschi's latest work, "Fascinating, overwhelming, and what I call superb writing. It's as much a performance piece as it a novel. I'd like to stage it."
