“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.