What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
* You don’t know how to age Your wounds have opened you To all the winds You think you know yourself But all you have is emptiness
Writing will have only been the briefest of mysteries
* There is nothing left Where there was once a body
I don’t see you any more Scattered there
Shame I never really knew how to die
* Advice? Night left nothing But scorn for the bedsheets And on the floor An unrolled swathe of green sari Indifferent to the lot Of a woman effaced by her bruises
* This sticky thing Issuing from my body Announcing every month Its fatal purity I forgot what it was to live Until there were no more grand entrances Of this resinous muck
"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work."
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