Literature in Translation |
“Sacred Sun,” “My Language,” “Poetry’s Silence” & “X-Askuñ”
“They ask me about my language, how it is made. / I tell them they should carry a pitcher to the creek. // They want to know about this wailing. / I tell them to walk in a place of rocks.”
Literature in Translation |
“The hood of my sweatshirt,” “On the other side of the Atlantic” & “O Street”
“Here, the day I put on my blue ‘Just Do It’ / and pulled the hood over my head for shelter / from the relentless cold also running down the street, / I offered myself to death by / police. Just for the hood. And my skin.”
Literature in Translation |
from Anima
“The body was interspersed and interwoven by veins of light. It / floats in the air. On its gray death shroud it floats high above the city / in the green summer air in the flood of light which pulls along with it / city, hospital, people in raging swirls upward …”
Literature in Translation |
from The Thorn Puller
“I went to Asakusa in Tokyo hoping to gain 46,000 days’ worth of virtue. Tradition says that a visit to Sensoji temple on that day is the equivalent of making pilgrimages for 46,000 days in a row. I’d planned to meet a gardening expert in Tokyo for work, and July 10 was the only day before the Obon holidays I had any free time.”
Literature in Translation |
from Final Judgements
“In art, as in any other activity, it is advisable to imitate for as long as possible. Only when there is no other choice does it become tolerable to be original.”
Literature in Translation |
from Motherfield
“Every year the motherfield is a bride / under a thin muslin of snow, / under the strict supervision of tradition, / it is smoothed with rakes, / combed with ploughs, / inseminated.”
Literature in Translation |
“I am Watermelon, I Am Lamb” and “Skin Mole”
“My family used me to drink water, / they thought I was a tin cup. / This goes back to the day I cupped my palm in prayer, / and to the times I’d fallen but didn’t break.”
Literature in Translation |
from Blood Red
“Thinking about my husband kept making me heave; sweet, soft retches. I managed the bouts of nausea with lemon rind or by peeling the skin from my lips. It took us time, orphaned little souls that we were, to leave one other.”
Literature in Translation |
“Village,” “Poems,” “Birds,” “Deer,” “Explanation,” “Countryside,” “Zapatoca,” & “Tree”
“The light / of words // with which / we look at / light.”
Literature in Translation |
“After the Storm,””Daily Routine” & “At night you sweep …”
“Everything is so perfectly clear, there are no more secrets, the birds settle in their place and the nights find shelter beneath the deserts. Out of your eye, a small stone softly rolls.”
Literature in Translation |
from Night
“I search for truth in the books discarded in the square, in the dreams of sleeping cats and the intelligent gaze of dogs that roam through the gardens of Congress.”
Literature in Translation |
“To calm the ill that assails,” “We were among those called,” “A semantic error hides” & “The space of my body is this”
“We were among those called / against nature. Our existence / toppled and twisted the laws / of creation. But how could we, / luxuriant in our adolescent bodies, / be a waste, an untenable defect?”
Literature in Translation |
from Colonies of Paradise
“And Moscow’s on fire, all’s in — one and all — / the Kremlin cupola glistens in the light. / The fog rolls on, a worn gray man in a hat, / night backpedals into the subway shafts.”
Literature in Translation |
from claus and the scorpion
“lara wears a plaid shirt and her hair to the side, like a child / claus wears a plaid shirt and his hair to the side, like a child / neither one likes their name / and they walk down the wet streets, alone / because they don’t know how to walk any other way”
Literature in Translation |
from Victorious
“Those three days were my gateway into the soul of the military. After that, I went out into the field many more times. I didn’t wait for them to come see me on the verge of collapse.”