This article undertakes a reading of archival correspondence between Canadian poet George Bowering and the editors of the bilingual poetry journal El corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn (1962-1969), Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón, as they collaborated on a special issue that would become Bowering’s third book of poetry, The Man in Yellow Boots / El hombre de las botas amarillas (1965). This correspondence demonstrates the innovative ways in which Randall, Mondragón, and Bowering understand the home not as a non-political sphere closed off from the power structures of international politics and literary institutions, but rather as the necessary grounds for a transnational literary community that grew more politically engaged as the sixties unfolded. Rather than seeing the home as an insular and secure sphere in which the nation reproduces itself, Randall, Mondragón, and Bowering’s approach to mid-century domestic space offers distinctly different possibilities, even as this work unfolded within and against the patriarchal structures that defined life in both normative and countercultural contexts. The paper uses this context as a means of uncovering the collaborative efforts that went into translating Bowering’s work, while reading the Spanish translation of “To Cleave”—the opening poem of the volume, rendered in Spanish as “Penetrar” [To Penetrate]—for the traces of both a utopic transnational striving and the patriarchal violence that structured their contact.
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