Lucas Martínez arrived in Provincetown with two instruments: a charango, which is a small Andean guitar, and a classical guitar, on which he practices milonga folk songs.

As a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Martínez draws on lyrical traditions that include both sonnets and folk songs, though his poetry sounds distinctly modern. Milonga is a folk genre that was started by immigrants and Indigenous people working in Argentina’s port cities along the Río de la Plata. “They would have these dance parties,” Martínez says, with two guitarists playing and singing in call-and-response. That style inspired the form of some of his poems, along with variations like the payada, “almost like rap battles — off-the-cuff coming up with rhymes,” he says.

“I wanted to be associated with these songs and culture that I was a part of but living far away from,” he says. “That I could say, ‘This is something I belong to’ in a poem — that was really exciting.”

But he wasn’t quite satisfied by that idea. What did it mean for a poet to belong to a folk music tradition, he asks. “What legs does it have today, politically, socially, romantically?”

Martínez also does translations, and in that realm he encountered similar questions. How can translation convey the meter and rhythm of language or preserve its cultural potency?

For Martínez, these questions aren’t just central to the art of translation or poetry — they are the art. His poems often take the imperfection of translation as their subject. “I’ve written poems that investigate the question ‘How do you write a milonga in English?’ ” he says.

In two poems titled “Accompanied Milonga,” he offers an answer, with stanzas organized in two columns that mimic the musical notation of guitar accompaniment. The first syllables of each line are sequenced to represent a milonga’s typical chord progressions — “mi, do, si, si, re,” for instance.

Martínez’s interest in poetry came, in part, from songs he first heard in Claremont, Calif., where he grew up in a bilingual family that introduced him to a polyphony of musical traditions. His mother, a professional cellist from Detroit, played classical chamber music. His father, a biologist from General Las Heras, a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, loved South American folk music of all sorts. Martínez was raised on poems, milongas, and tangos with words by Jorge Luis Borges set to Astor Piazzolla’s music and South American folk songs, like “Duerme Negrito,” a lullaby popularized by guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui.

At Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., he took a poetry class taught by Mary Szybist. He was having trouble sleeping, and he revisited Yupanqui’s lullaby. One of Martínez’s first sonnets was born in the class, with these lines: “Terrified to find out they’re all leaving you behind/ aren’t you? That they are snipping the nights/ in half and living tomorrows you haven’t dreamt of/ yet?” In the original song, Martínez says, the mother needs her child to sleep so she can work in the fields. His poem responds to a “political reality in Latin America where things like rest or sleep don’t inherently belong to you.”

With Szybist’s encouragement, Martínez enrolled in an M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Virginia. There, he began doing literary translation. Among his first projects was translating works by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, a Puerto Rican poet and artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Book.

Inspired by poets like Evie Shockley, he began writing poems that called attention to their own forms. “If you’re interested in how a poem exists as a visual object on the page, you can translate more than just language but musicality as well, by using visual elements. That became part of my writing.” He started working on collage and visual poems, with slanted stanzas and clippings from other translated works.

Grammar itself is a protagonist in one of his poems, questioning the failure of language to capture the natural world. “Grammar asks. The Mojave desert./ be more concrete explain The truth,” Martínez writes in a collage poem of translated clippings by Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and others.

Borges remained an influence, and a contrapuntal poem titled “Considering a Latinate Question” takes a distinctly Borgesian turn. It has four columns that can be read horizontally or vertically, with different meanings conveyed each way. The first two columns are quotations from letters between two translators of Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Ben Bellit, arguing about how to accurately translate his work. The second two columns are clippings about trees and Argentina from letters between Martínez and his father.

At FAWC, Martínez is completing a manuscript of mixed media, essays, and collage poetry. “I might be accused of being a formalist,” he says. But the charge would be inaccurate. He continues to work across literary styles, writing sonnets, collage, and free verse. One of the first poems he completed in Provincetown was an ode to David Byrne.

Martínez has an unromantic approach to writing. “I know people who say, ‘I only write before dusk,’ but I’m not one of them,” he says.

In a poem titled “Weed,” inspired by the writing of horticulturist Marco Wilkinson, Martínez celebrates that unpredictability. “I like the idea of a weed as a form,” he says. “This life cropping up where it’s unwanted, dealing with a relationship to a place you aren’t always in.”