Margaret Randall is a prolific poet, essayist, and social activist. Co-founder of the influential bilingual literary magazine El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, Randall has authored over 150 books, amplifying marginalized voices and promoting social justice through her work. Margaret Randall’s work often intertwines the personal and political, offering profound insights into feminist, social justice, and anti-imperialist movements. Her memoirs and poetry collections, such as “Che on My Mind” and “To Change the World: My Years in Cuba,” exemplify her dedication to documenting and reflecting on revolutionary struggles and the role of women within them.
El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn
El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn was a groundbreaking bilingual literary magazine founded in 1962 by Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón. Based in Mexico City, it quickly became a vital platform for avant-garde and revolutionary voices across the Americas, publishing works in both Spanish and English. The magazine fostered cross-cultural dialogue and solidarity during politically tumultuous times, featuring contributions from prominent poets, writers, and activists. El Corno Emplumado not only highlighted diverse literary talents but also championed social justice, anti-imperialism, and feminist causes, leaving a lasting impact on the literary landscape.
Open Door Archive | El corno emplumado/The Plumed Horn
On Translation and Bilingualism
Translation was always important to us. Good translation was one of our main motivations for doing the journal. We would like to have been able to make every piece in every issue bilingual, but that didn’t turn out to be possible. Along with reading hundreds of submissions, choosing what we wanted to publish, raising money for the endeavor, and promoting and distributing El Corno, there wasn’t much time left over for translation. And we didn’t know many others whose translations satisfied us. We did what we could. In the case of the books, sometimes we made an extra effort, or someone else did. And yes, Elinor Randall was my mother. She occasionally translated something for the magazine, or one of our books. She did Marsias & Adila, our issue number 4, which was by the Catalan poet Agustí Bartra. And she did Majakuagy-Moukeia, the book-length creation story according to the Indians on Mexico’s western coast, collected by Ana Mairena (a pseudonym, as she was married at the time to the governor of the state of Nyarit). Later my mother devoted herself to translating the Cuban revolutionary writer José Martí, work she was doing up to a few days before her death at the age of 97.
