Keep me safe, language, wall me off against time



Appassionata

when your voice reaches my ear,
my lethargic hearts startles
awake, my ears’limbs pulls you to me,
to catch in the depths of your breath
the familiar tremor that is now fading
and was the beginning of our prelude.
in a flash, my words fly up, swollen into an
orchestra, every sentence a
promise, an appassionata, wanting to be more
than merely said. enter my ear,
here you will be welcomed magna voce,
seen with all senses! even your
farewell is a bright chord, a
tender coda with a ritardando ring.



Translation

is there a zone of darkness between all languages,
a black river, that swallows words
and stories and transforms them?
here sentences must disrobe,
begin to roam, learn to swim,
not lose the memory that nests in
their bodies, a secret nucleus.
will the columbine’s blue be a shade of violet
when it reaches the other side,
and the red bee balm become a pear, cinnamon-
sweet? will my tench be missing a fin
in the light of the new language? will it have to learn
to crawl or to walk upright?
does language know how to draw another language towards it
or only how to turn the other language away? can each word,
then, risk the transit, believe itself
invulnerable, dipped in pitch and hard as steel?

(review in progress)

I received an electronic ARC via NetGalley.

This is a readable collection of poems by a poet I was not previously familiar with. I found some markedly more enjoyable than others, but overall it's a nice translation that isn't entirely to my taste, but that certainly doesn't make it bad.