Yolanda Pantin

Yolanda Pantin was born in 1954 in Caracas, raised in the small town of Tumero, and studied Literature at the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas. She is one of the most distinguished poets of Venezuela. Pantin is also an essayist and writer of children's stories. Her poetry has been translated into French, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Dutch. The Spanish publishing house Pretextos has published an anthology of her poetry entitled, Country. Pantin has been awarded many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency, the 2017 Casa de América Prize (for her book, What Time Makes), and the 2020 Federico Garcia Lorca Prize. The Lorca Prize jury highlighted Pantin for having developed a “long and profound journey” through the different resources of poetic discourse, from her initial exploration in conversational poetry in the languages of sentimentality, with countless records that portray “the sinuosities and shadows of the human condition.”

She currently lives in Caracas.

Déjà vu

I dreamed last night that I was writing
and this notebook was my consolation;
I couldn't sleep for going on with it
without knowing what I was recording.

What were you for me, then,
poetry? I couldn't remember it,
even in the dream, always,
on the tip of my tongue.

Deep in the wood I dreamed
I was a stag or a horse
and galloped looking for answers.

In the dream I found a notebook,
and it began with the first letters:

a,
e,
i,

    — Translation by Rowena Hill