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.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Beloved of the Dawn”
“Eos, goddess of the dawn, once slept with Ares — every Rosy Fingered One sleeps with him once. Aphrodite surprised them …”
Literature in Translation |
“Honeymoon”
“I was looking for some Goyeneche among my records on the corner shelf when all of a sudden, he asked did I have any pasillos? I stood there like I’d been struck by lightning. What kind of Yankee had tastes like that?”
Literature in Translation |
from “The Aeronaut”
“Born into hardship, Gao Likuan had grown tired of people’s sneers and joined the Communists to print their leaflets. His leaflets were better than anyone else’s, his colors more vivid, only growing stronger with time.”
Literature in Translation |
from The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
“The aphorist Elias Canetti, drawing on his own reading experience, noted: ‘The great aphorists read as though they had all known one another well.’ This was certainly not true of Kafka.”
Literature in Translation |
“Full Throttle,” “Hand,” “We” & “When”
“Even in / the most benevolent / hand, there was still / money, and there is more / than enough of death.”
Literature in Translation |
from 13 Lunas 13 / 13 Moons 13
“moment for rest, / for the simple intimation of a dead time / in order to think of you, / to invite you to my table, / to invoke women who were of my blood and inhabit an uncertain memory …”