Octavio Quintanilla — The Book of Wounded Sparrows

Process Note

For this translation, my guiding question wasn't primarily how to preserve sequence, but how to recreate poetic composition itself inside a single viewing field. I worked from the premise that poems often "stack" perception—image, memory, aftermath, address—so that multiple moments occupy one verbal space at once.

To mimic that in a time-based medium, I designed the translation around layering: multiple frames held together inside one frame, not as decoration, but as a structural analog to poetic writing's simultaneous pressures. The aim was to let different registers coexist without being forced into a single hierarchy—so the viewer reads the work as an accumulation of concurrent claims rather than as a linear explanation.

A crucial element in this piece is the author's own visual practice. The painting featured in the film is by Quintanilla, from his series Frontexto, where he is developing his practice into the visual record—extending the textual into an image-based archive.

The translation process wanted to capture that movement: not treating the painting as supplementary illustration, but as a co-equal register that can be overlaid against the originating poem. Because the poem is devastating, the method had to avoid the usual comforts of interpretation.

Layering becomes an ethical choice: instead of "resolving" the poem into a clarified message, the translation preserves its force by keeping competing presences in tension—text against image, record against aftermath, utterance against what can't be assimilated.

So the work's accountability is built through simultaneous architecture: stacking, overlay, and co-presence as the means of translating compression, recurrence, and emotional pressure. The point is not to add visuals to a poem, but to construct a frame in which the poem's internal simultaneity can reappear—legibly—without being domesticated.