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.”
Literature in Translation |
“Labour,” “Piano Factory” & “Without tears the eyes spill by themselves”
“Today I am clutching Mandelstam’s poem like a broken glass, / though it seems not of today, or yesterday, or tomorrow. / A poem explains nothing, / it’s like an orchestra wandering lost in the fields …”
Literature in Translation |
from No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace
“The sirens’ song provides an abridged idea of your / voice. You’re still this broken shimmer tormenting / the mirror of the banality of men.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Day Jupiter Met Saturn (Another Colorful Story)”
“From this angle, she looked less like a living woman than a watercolor painting, frozen as if she were very calm, and in fact she was, only she couldn’t feel anything anymore, she hadn’t for a long while.”
Literature in Translation |
from Decarceration
“And in a flash, this insight that you are / matter which has crossed centuries of flesh, // which makes you feel how much you are, / already, there, / off the subject.”
Literature in Translation |
from Pina
“What she had was better than a first name. Tera Vahine. That Woman. Nothing cruel about those two words. Not when they’re just words. Just a way to name the person they all steered clear of.”
Literature in Translation |
“Sleeping Beauty,” “Eurydice,” “Persephone,” “Silent Writing,” “Winter” & “Loss”
“They will kill me, sever my voice, / cut my throat, cut me out / of the wedding photo, / tear out my heart / and its assignations, / if they discover I’m unfaithful – / not with someone else / but with myself, / and not just once in a while.”
Literature in Translation |
from Belle Greene: “The White Marble Palace, 1905-1908”
“Belle had prepared for her interview with painstaking care, acquainting herself with the Murray Hill neighborhood in which the library was located and learning all she could about the man she was going to meet. John Pierpont Morgan.”