Ulalume González de Leόn

Ulalume González de León was born in 1928 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the daughter of two poets, Roberto Ibañez and Sara de Ibañez. She studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Mexico.

While living in Mexico in 1948, Ulalume became a naturalized Mexican citizen. She married painter and architect Teodoro González de León, and together they had three children. She published essays, stories, and poems, and worked with Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz as an editor of two literary journals, Plural and Vuelta. She also translated the work of H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Lewis Carroll, and e.e. cummings.

In the 1970’s in Latin America, González de León was part of a generation of women writers challenging the traditional identities of women, marriage, and relationships. Her poetry earned her many awards, including the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the Flower of Laura Poetry Prize, and the Alfonso X Prize. Ulalume González de León died in 2009 of respiratory failure and complications of Alzheimer’s.

Book Reviews, Interviews, and Excerpts

Interviews & Excerpts, Volume Three

North Bay Bohemian article: “A Trilogy in Verse: Plagios Volume 3 Released by Local Translators.” By Kary Hess. May 27, 2025.

Reviews of Volume Three

This third and final volume of Ulalume González de León’s Plagios is a triumph, a culmination of some of the most compelling elements of her poetic project: here is González de León’s exploration of found and familiar language, her curiosity and playfulness, her embrace of the everyday alongside the poetic. These revelatory poems plumb poetic possibility, creating convergences that both delight and trouble as they incorporate song, riddles and games, nonsense, rumination, contemplation, and celebration. Though they ultimately herald joy and discovery, the poems in Plagios are threaded with the realities of time, darkness, loss, and even death, evidence of their comfort with duality and tension that belies the brevity of their compact and concise forms. How wonderful to receive González de León’s work through this bilingual edition that lays bare the precision and care of the translators’ work in bringing across the wordplay, depth, sensibility, and humor of her voice. The poems in Plagios and this marvelous translation are an important reminder that the literary establishment has long overlooked luminaries whose light deserves to shine in new corners and contexts, and I am grateful to have been introduced to Ulalume González de León as both a corrective measure and an honoring of her immense talent.

— Amanda Moore, author of Requeening, selected for 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong

There are certain poets whose intelligence, sensitivity to the world, and instinct for the symbol, are singular and instantly recognizable. Ulalume González de León is tapped directly into the source. Her poetry, in lucid and lovely translation by Ehret and Morales, is concerned with what matters to all of us: presence and absence; how di#erent times permeate our lives through memory; and our fate, which is to be continually left here in this world to remember until we ourselves leave. As this book progresses it achieves an almost unbearable level of intensity and honesty and directness of perception. This poet is a rare master. I return to her when I need to be reminded what poetry is, and can be.

— Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams

Weaving the remembered and the imagined into presences that disappear and live within us, that fill with darkness and light, breadth and depth of perception, this third and final volume of Ulalume González de León’s Plagios/Plagiarisms welcomes you. These remarkably original poems invite your participation as someone in whom the dynamics of this world, the physics of love, the veracity of rooms and mirrors, flowers and words, and the materiality of death—which ‘never happens / because it always happens’—cultivates questions we live with night and day.

— William O’Daly, author of The New Gods and translator of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Twilight

About the Translators

Terry Ehret one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, earned a degree in psychology from Stanford University and an MA in Cre­ative Writing from San Francicsco State. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey from Kelly’s Cove Press. Her literary awards include the Nation­al Poetry Series, the California Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation, and eight Pushcart Prize nominations. From 2004 to 2006, she served as the poet laureate of Sonoma County, where she lives and teaches writing. See more on Terry Ehret.

Nancy J. Morales, a first-generation American of Puerto Rican parents, earned her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College, a master’s in teaching English as a Second Language from Adelphi University, and a doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University. She has taught at Dominican University, the College of Marin, Sonoma State University, and other schools, from elementary to graduate levels. She has served as a board member for the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Alumni Association and teaches Spanish to private clients. She has received a Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She lives in Napa County with her husband and son.

John Johnson’s poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Boxcar Poetry Review, Clade Song, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Web Conjunctions. He is a long-time student of the Spanish language and has studied letter-press printing with Iota Press of Sebastopol, producing chapbooks and bilingual broadsides.