Margaret Randall and Transnational Domestic Space

Translating George Bowering in El corno emplumado

Abstract

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. 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.