The poetic work of José Antonio Mazzotti in the USA: Declinaciones latinas and Las flores del Mall

Abstract

In José Antonio Mazzotti's poetry, it is of special relevance to study the impact of his exile to the United States since 1988, the year in which this distinguished Peruvian-American writer began a new life journey marked by displacement. Such impact is especially visible in his collections of poems Declinaciones Latinas [Latin Declensions] (1999) and Las flores del Mall [The Flowers of the Mall] (2009). Regarding the first one, this study focuses on the perspective with which it transmits deterritorialization, the reflection on Peru and its destinies carried out from a distance; a perspective in which hybridity occurs in the decentering of the "migrant subject" (Cornejo Polar, 1996). The study analyzes Baroque, Gongorean, Sorjuanesque, and Renaissance keys, as well as mythological, colonial and contemporary references. It examines Las flores del Mall under the desacralizing and critical vision of the United States, selecting some poems and fragments which exemplify the different objectives of criticism, and analyzing the mechanisms for their poeticization. This work highlights the relevance of Mazzotti’s poetry in the panorama of Latin American migrant writing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and concludes with a detailed list of translations of his poems into English.