Poetry chapbook
ISBN 978-1-957746-16-6
p.43
 
Dictionary of Bodies is a collection of poetry that attempts to weave together sinews of connection and intimacy. It is a collection that attempts to use poetic affect and imagery to approach, open-heartedly, the act of translation and it questions the very notion of translatability. Grounded in Garza's love and study of the Japanese language, Dictionary of Bodies is a work that experiments with the affective translation of Japanese words and phrases that struggle to find ground in the incompleteness of the English language. With a mother's body curling close to her child and a horde throwing skulls with deformities and extra toes, with muffled teeth and rusted train cars made of cartilage that know what sloshes beneath the shore, Dictionary of Bodies is a work grounded in surreality and in the embrace of communicative possibility.
 
Praise for Dictionary of Bodies:
 
"There is a way to read Japanese text by letting your eyes follow only some instinctively chosen ideograms without interpreting or recognizing their sounds. As a result, a paragraph or a page instantly forms an image that communicates like Joan Mitchell's abstract paintings. Kristyn Garza recreated similar sense-and-culture crossing experiences in the entries of Dictionary of Bodies. Her minimalist English language definitions evoke immediate, intimate images and sentiments that provide the most sensual translations for the 30 highly nuanced Japanese words and phrases. A Japanese phrase inserted in each entry adds a curiously fitting counterpoint. I find her creative work deeply affecting in many layers." Miho Kinnas, author of Waiting for the Sunset to Bury Red Camellias
 
"In Kristyn Garza’s Dictionary of Bodies, thirty Japanese words and phrases are reimagined through the lens of sound, image, and emotional resonance, dissolving the boundaries of language into a beautifully surreal experience. Garza, a Chicana poet from the Mexican-U.S. border, deftly intertwines English, Spanish, and Japanese to create poems that delve into both the limits of translation and the communal bonds formed through our shared emotional capacity. Each ten-line poem in this collection is a small, intricate body, spinning webs of strangeness and surreality, inviting readers to engage with the deeply human experience of attempting—despite the risks—to fully carry meaning across borders." Jack Jung, cotranslator of Yi Sang: Selected Works
 
"Kristyn Garza’s Dictionary of Bodies challenges the most common associations of dictionary. The dictionary of these poems is not distanced or orderly but visceral and overwhelmingly physical, anything but static. In these poems, landscapes, bodies and words are fossilized, cracked, hollowed out, pried apart. These are poems of marrows, tactile poems about existing in this world, in its volatile matter. But these are also poems of song, poems that chime. Read this powerful debut." Johannes Göransson, author of Summer
 
Introduction: On Translation, Affect, and Experience
"Translation, at its root, is the tender attempt at understanding each other. It’s important to note the use of attempt here instead of act. There seems to be this widespread idea of translation as an act of literalization, an act of equation and exactness. This should not be the expectation for this book. 
 
This book is a direct resistance to the notion of translation as an act of literalization. This book leans into failure, into incompleteness, into excess. This book leans into what poet and translator Johannes Göransson would call threat. To Göransson, the “...threat of translation is the threat of a kind of excess: too many versions of too many texts by too many authors from too many lineages...[translation, as poetry does] travels. It crosses boundaries.” In this book, these poems exist as excess in an attempt to traverse boundaries of language and culture.
 
In affective writing, the image, the sonic space, and the associative landscape are all emphasized. Taking thirty words and phrases from the Japanese language, I decided to try my hand at affectively translating them into English. Instead of prioritizing literal equation from Japanese into English, each poem utilizes image, sound, and association to craft an affective experience of the Japanese word/phrase into English. Towards this goal, below is a link to a playlist on Spotify I hope you’ll listen to for the enhancement of your experience reading this book.
 
"Dictionary of Bodies" on Spotify"
 
Kristyn Garza, a Chicana from the U.S./Mexico border, moved from her hometown of McAllen, Texas to Austin to pursue her bachelor's degree in English Literature at St. Edward’s University where she studied and fell in love with the Japanese language. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame. She was longlisted for Palette Poetry's 2022 Sappho Prize and her work has been published or is forthcoming in AGNI, Poets.org, Tupelo Quarterly, Cream City Review, The McNeese Review, RHINO, Pembroke Magazine, and others. Most recently, she was awarded the 2023 Academy of American Poets Billy Maich Award. Kristyn currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is in her second year of her PhD in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.