A pastel crayon obscures the unwanted text in [To the queer silence…], a poem from "Hotel Almighty." The pastel gives the page a hazy, static look, that is punctuated by the black-circled words of the found poem. Erasure poetry is about possibility—this poem springs from page 13 of "Misery," while another poem in the book, [I was a meadow…], uses the same page to different effect.
"Earlier in the pandemic, I took up the friendly and pleasurable challenge of reading in tandem two recently published translations of poems by the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli....Even without a shred of Italian to help me, I can feel in Pascoli’s original the somatic and emotional energy that both of these translators clearly sense and write toward and out of in their translated versions of the poem."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"One verse in particular left me unsatisfied with my translation: 'pasan bajo el calor de mi ventana' became 'pass beneath my sweltry window.' 'Sweltry' is a weighty word, and I imagine the nuns suffering under their frocks in the Caribbean heat, but 'calor' remits to human warmth, even tenderness, those things—like the smell of used books and towels and the entangled scent of incense—that are of the flesh."
