Cecilia Vicuna: Deer Book

The fruition of decades of labor, Vicuña’s poetical works on the cosmologies and myths of the deer are now realized in a gorgeously designed artist’s book

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948) first encountered in 1985, Cecilia Vicuña: Deer Book brings together nearly 40 years of the artist’s poetry, "poethical" translations and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world. Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.