Literature in Translation |
from So the Day Begins: Grief Refrain, poems by Anja Utler
“So the day begins, / kettle vibrates, something in / the sink is clinking / chatter of metallic teeth”
Literature in Translation |
“Over the church,” “I trust this book,” “Over a black abyss of water” & “To the poet, the century hasn’t given a thought”
“If the century doesn’t care for the ancestors, / I don’t care for its great-grandchildren: the herd. / My century — my poison, my century — my harm, / my century — my enemy, my century — hell.”
Literature in Translation |
“Villon’s movement” & “To ex-ist? To be …”
“And if the nature of light, then, is not to be made luminous by something else, by another source, if the nature of light, is to be lit by itself, then I propose that Villon’s words aspired to be this light.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Vast Night,” “Moon Rise” & “Once”
“Often, I gazed out at you, me standing by the window / as if from the day before, standing, before you, marveling. / The new city still appeared barred to me, and the landscape, / reticent, took umbrage, as if I did not exist.”
Literature in Translation |
“pilot mode” & “a simple math”
“pain has a unit of measure. it is called dol. there are also instruments to measure the pain thresholds – dolorimeters — or palpometers (the newest versions, based on applying pressure instead of heat as a stimulus)”
Literature in Translation |
from Study of Sorrows: “This Evening,” “[After Illness, my earlocks”], “[Who planted that banana tree”] & “Feelings in Spring”
“Should I take a walk / somewhere, like those happy, healthy people? // Let me wait for the sun to dissipate the mist and see / whether this is really a good day.”
Literature in Translation |
from Transparencies: “To Know How to Approach,” “1980,” “Riverbed” & “Dorsoduro”
“To know how to approach. / How we see the riddle of distance / from here to where the places we’ve lived thicken. / I summon the islands of heather and ice / the Atlantic dawn / a plane in ascent / hard verses of gulls like fine chains.”
Literature in Translation |
from All That Dies in April, a novel by Mariana Travacio
“I’ve been telling him we need to leave, but he doesn’t want to. He’s attached to this land, he says we were born here and we should die here, too. But we’re the only ones left, I tell him.”
Literature in Translation |
from One Year and Three Months: “The Mystery and the Secret,” “The Truth of Fiction” & “One Year and Three Months”
“I watch her in the mirror / as she arranges her hair / like someone lining up at the boarding gate / in search of her destiny. / I don’t know what her patience promises, / nor what my silence holds.”
Literature in Translation |
“Speech Therapy,” “Two Stars” & “Jay”
“As a child, he stuttered / terribly, hid behind others, / spoke indistinctly. // They sent him as expected / first to a speech therapist, / then to a drama club.
Literature in Translation |
from The Story of the Marquis de Cressy, a novel by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni,
“The marquis, accustomed to having his desires anticipated, could not stand this kind of scorn from a girl who seemed to have no reason to display such pride.”
Literature in Translation |
“blazing cities,” “page blank” & “moment of silence”
“while night and day / cities flicker on under the stars / while things go swimmingly in Amsterdam / I doubt Ghouta / could present you a single dewy lawn / or Gaza …”
Literature in Translation |
“Canto XXVIII” from Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso
“And when I turned around and my own eyes / Were met with what appears in that vast space / Whenever one looks intently at its circling, // I saw a point that radiated such an intense light / That eyes seared by it are forced to close / Because of its extreme brightness.”
Literature in Translation |
“On Visiting an Absent Taoist Master,” “Endless Longing,” “Drinking Alone by Moonlight” & “Lute Song”
“I try as soul to leap the earth and air between us, but / my dream self can’t get through the gate that marks the Great Divide.”
Literature in Translation |
“Angelic Beings,” “Family Geography” & “Rocks”
“Angelic beings dwell in reflections, / her wrinkled face in the kitchen window, / the young man’s profile in the windshield.”