Apocalypse and Amnesia, or Adrift in Our Own Garbage: Rafael Spregelburd’s Spam

This introduction to the author’s translation of Rafael Spregelburd’s play situates both text and production within the Argentine artist’s oeuvre and poetics and analyzes them as critiques of contemporary globalized society. The article argues that Spam proposes language as a tool by which to retrieve humanity and explains how the subsequent translation strives to honor the play’s lyricism and linguistic precision while also revealing translation’s own connection to globalization’s ill effects.