Auden and Gabriela Mistral, but others are attributed to figures I haven’t been able to track down (including Aedo, above).
Some of these passages are attributed to known figures, such as W. The gray text varies in size, from large characters of short passages, to text smaller than the text of the poems when the passages are longer. This is enacted literally on the page with text, often quotes with attribution, printed in gray literally overlapping the black text of the poems themselves. Voices in these poems speak over one another, sometimes because those speaking are doing so intentionally, and sometimes as if we as readers are hearing multiple conversations simultaneously. Black Volta, one of the main parts of the river (the others are White Volta and Red Volta), forms the border between three African countries, including Burkina Faso, and this connection of history and international borders is perhaps a place to start understanding the poems in Upper Volta.
The Republic of Upper Volta was named for the Volta River, itself named by Portuguese traders.
González is a Chilean poet and anthropologist, and Upper Volta takes its title ( Alto Volta in Spanish) from the colonial name (French: République de Haute-Volta) of the country now known as Burkina Faso in West Africa. Every now and then I encounter a book that I can’t quite get a handle on, and this month’s Stanza Break selection, Upper Volta by Yanko González, translated by Stephen Rosenshein, is one of those books.