Two Catalan Poems

Abstract

POETRY Two Catalan Poems by Gemma Gorga La bona educació L’estiu que complia set anys li van regalar un estoig de fusta amb un llapis i una goma. El llapis, perquè en rosegués la mina fins a trobar el nervi vague de la paraula. La goma, per esborrar la paraula abans de dir-la. El Sentit del Creixement Flors i barrets i ungles i portes creixen enfora. Si mai creixen endins és perforant el túnel terrós del dolor. Un dolor que coneixen coves i arrels i orelles i dones, que han après a créixer endins. Good Manners The summer she turned seven they gave her a wooden pencil case with a pencil and eraser. The pencil, so she could gnaw the lead until she found the vagus nerve of the word. The eraser, to erase the word before she could say it. Editorial note: From Mur, copyright © 2015 by Gemma Gorga. From the manuscript Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga, English translation copyright © 2019 by Sharon Dolin. PHOTO: M. MAGGS/PIXABAY 22 WLT SUMMER 2019 Direction of Growth Flowers hats fingernails and doors grow outward. If they ever grew inward earth’s tunnel would be pierced with pain. A pain known by caves roots ears and women who have learned how to grow inward. Translations from the Catalan By Sharon Dolin Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968, where she is a professor of medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature. Author of six collections of poetry, her most recent volume is Mur (2015), which won the Premi de la Critica de Poesia Catalana. Sharon Dolin (sharondolin. com) is the author of six poetry collections. She received grants from PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull for her translation of Gorga’s prose poems, Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019). She lives in New York City and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona each June. SUMMER READS Daniel Simon’s Summer Reads Longing for some poets’ words—perhaps with an activist edge—to accompany him in the months ahead, Editor in Chief Daniel Simon envisions some quiet, sunny mornings with three recent books. Gabeba Baderoon The History of Intimacy: Poems Kwela Books In South African poet Gabeba Baderoon’s fourth collection of poems, the predominance of English jostles against Afrikaans, Xhosa, Arabic , and such Cape Malay expressions as “Daai is doenya se goete” (these are only earthly things). This phrase, spoken by Baderoon’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated, appears in the poem “No Name,” which recounts the erasure—both legal and cultural—of the author’s Muslim family while growing up on the Cape in the apartheid era of the 1970s and ’80s. Whether looking at black-and-white family photos in “Focal Length” or recalling the “ordinary tragedy” of housing discrimination in “The Flats,” the speaker in Baderoon’s poems lingers on the often-jagged edge of intimacy, all the while insisting that she belongs “on this earth.” Billy Bragg The Three Dimensions of Freedom Faber Social From Faber’s description of the book: “In this short and vital polemic, Billy Bragg argues that to protect ourselves from encroaching tyranny, we must look beyond this one-dimensional notion of what it means to be free and, by reconnecting liberty to equality and accountability, restore the individual agency engendered by the three dimensions of freedom.” Liberty, equality . . . accountability? If anyone can diagnose “the crisis of accountability in Western democracies” in a novel and interesting way, it must be Billy Bragg. C. D. Wright Casting Deep Shade: An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co. Photographs by Denny Moers Copper Canyon In an email, Frank Paino described this book to me: “Though not overtly a book on climate change, Casting Deep Shade invokes the magnificence of beech trees as emblematic of all we stand to lose in our hell-bent lurch toward destruction. Her quirky, memorable poems beg us: Listen.” In hours of darkness, I often recall one of my favorite lines by the late C. D. Wright (1949– 2016): “draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on...