“I make love to myself with eye crusts and sheet marks in my cheeks.” In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the Venezuelan poet Paola Assad Barbarino turns her eye towards the overlooked liminal moments of human life: waking up at the wrong hour in an unfamiliar bed, wandering the streets in the days between jobs, wishing for someone who left a long time ago. Through two dramatically different metaphors—the experience of jet lag in the first, and the life of a street cat in the second—these poems, expertly translated by Magdalena Arias Vásquez, draw our attention to the rich detail of the moments in our own lives we would rather ignore or hurry to get over with—to our shared experience of frailty and transience in a world that was not made for us. Read on!
Jet Lag
I live intensely in unearthly hours:
I wake up when it grows dark,
I eat breakfast at hour zero,
I try on dresses while fasting,
I decide the calmness in peak hour,
I curse in childlike schedule,
I make love to myself with eye crusts and sheet marks in my cheeks,
I crave kisses with an expired date,
I miss you when it is already too late,
in short,
it is jet lag.
Don’t Shop, Adopt
In the end we are all street cats
mangy orphans salivating across a roof
begging for a little bit more milk
or oil
or a job.
We all search for the dry shadow at the time of the storm
to shelter us from its restless steps
sometimes we even use others’ whiskers like umbrellas
crawl to its sound
until we hear the bullets
and it’s time to flee again.
Loyalty is just the leftovers
rotting in the alley.
Translated from the Spanish by Magdalena Arias Vásquez
Paola Assad Barbarino is a poet and visual artist from Caracas, Venezuela based in New York. She was a finalist in the III Concurso de Poesía Jóven Rafael Cadenas (La Poeteca, Caracas, 2017), with her poem “El Rapto”. Her poems are also found in Liberoamericanas: 140 Poetas Latinoamericanas (Libero, Barcelona, 2018), UBICUO (Lecturas de arraigo, Madrid, 2021), and Círculo de Poesía. She was invited by Nueva York Poetry Review to exhibit her work at the New York City Poetry Festival in 2024 and 2025 in Governor’s Island. Todo Menos Invierno is her first poetry collection, and it received honorable mention in the Premio de Poesía Ida Gramcko 2024 (Santiago, Chile). She is a member of PEN Venezuela.
Magdalena Arias Vásquez is a writer and translator. Her English-language poems have been published in journals such as AGNI, Poetry Northwest, among others. She was a 2024 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and has received recognition and support for her work from organizations like AWP, Brooklyn Poets, among others. She is a graduate of Under the Volcano Writing Residence Poetry in Spanish Cohort in Tepoztlán, Mexico, and of Williams College, where she earned a BA in English and French Literature. Born and raised in Panama City, Panama, she currently splits her time between the isthmus and New York.
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