Posts filed under 'catalan poetry'

Translation Tuesday: “Landscape with Winter” by Anna Dodas i Noguer

December 7, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Clyde Moneyhun

at night constellations / observe themselves in isolation

This Translation Tuesday, we bring to you a thirteen-part poem by Anna Dodas i Noguer which was first published as a chapbook in Barcelona and was awarded the prestigious Amadeu Oller Prize in 1986. Blending the fragmented images of a snowy landscape with moments of gentle, philosophical questioning—the hypnotic rhythm of Dodas’ language recedes and surges with the force of the river that courses through her long poem. As translator Clyde Moneyhun suggests, this poem is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s description of her own collection, Winter Trees. That is, “Landscape with Winter” is a poem which contains what Plath calls “small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power.” Marking the first time that Dodas’ work is available in English, we are proud to present to our readers this exquisite work of Catalan poetry. 

Landscape with Winter

The tormented earth groans like a heart.
—Verdague

1

Hair is undone
and the stars shoot
across a milky firmament.
The acceleration, the jolt.
My heart fits
in the paw of an ogre.
Gallop, gallop
jump
gallop, gallop
the mountains ferocious
as the sea.
They cry, the bells,
they cry.
A faucet drips
like a streaming
tear.
All is sleeping.

2

A flock of clouds
white boulevards
snow, snow, snow.
Arrow of silence
flattens the air.
Life itself
            is mute.

Make me a place, make me a place
surface like skating rink
                         ice.
I see nothing, I am blind
the light
            dazzles
                        echoes.

It’s snowing.
Sacrifice spaces
take away the image, if you can:
nothing remains
                        nothing more
than a vast
                        desolate sorrow. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Gemma Gorga

December 3, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Sharon Dolin

Like sad eyes / gestures are also inherited

This week’s Translation Tuesday features the poetry of Gemma Gorga. The poems revolve around themes of domestic labor and consumption; but they are not what they appear on the surface. Fastidious consideration of fish-flesh or mercury or cautionary affects inherited by one’s grandmother hint at a nuanced understanding of the traces of events left on the body and the mind. “Still the smell does not want to leave them, / as if tiny bags of memory remained,” Gorga writes, indicating the complex and grotesque traces that always remain after affects. Visceral, but not overly descriptive, the style weaves potent materials with potent concepts in metaphoric embraces. These poems show that whole lives, whole beings, can be explained and articulated by the smallest things: an anchovy’s spine, a pellet of mercury, a poem.

Poetics of the Fragment

When you return from the market
you must clean the anchovies,
which means ripping off the head and tail,
removing the thin strips still sticky
with life, the central spine
that detaches with a slight zip,
afterwards washing them,
purifying them under tap water
(even death requires baptism),
making sure no tiny eye remains
trapped in the moist blindness of your fingers,
finally soaking them in vinegar,
waiting until the flesh whitens
cured in acid, cured all the way through.
They have lain for hours beneath the planetary
light of oil and pepper.
Still the smell does not want to leave them,
as if tiny bags of memory remained
hidden in the folds forming matter and air.
Making sure no one sees me,
I smell the backs of my hands
(for the sea trace from fish bellies)
and I know they are yours. READ MORE…