What Sparks Poetry

Translation

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. 

In our series focused on Translation, we invite poet-translators to share seminal experiences in their practices, bringing poems from one language into another. How does the work of translating feel essential to the writing of one’s own poetry? Our contributors reflect on inspiring moments as intricate as a grammatical quirk and as wide-ranging as the history or politics of another place. 

Robin Myers on Javier Peñalosa M.’s “The Crane”

“Because we are going to die,” C. D. Wright wrote, “an expression of intensity is justified.” Every time I remember this sentence, which is often, I’m pierced, jarred to attention. It makes me shiver. It’s the justified that really gets to me: because Wright is talking about poems, about poetry as “the language of intensity,” and because I crave justification when it comes to poems, among other things.

Because we are going to die (this is how I amend Wright’s line for myself these days), a fact I cannot grasp, poetry—that expression of intensity—is one way to do some grasping. Some flailing. Some making-with-language, language being one of the few tools available to me, in response to what I do and do not understand.

I’ve been rereading Javier Peñalosa M.’s poem “La grulla” for years now. I was moved to translate it (as “The Crane”) because it made me feel the way the Wright quote does, and because I both did and did not understand it, not entirely. I still don’t claim to, or care to. I translated this poem because I wanted to get closer to it. Sometimes that’s the only reason.

I’d describe “The Crane” as a deceptively narrative poem, in the way that a dream can present what feels like a coherent story you’ll then struggle to recapitulate once you’re conscious again. The story, as it were, is more like a snapshot remembered: the speaker finds an injured crane in a boat by a riverbank and uses an oar to put the bird out of its misery, an act that fills him both with shame and with a feeling of identification he can’t quite describe. Years later—and here the young poet’s voice becomes ancient—the speaker continues to imagine the crane as if it were part of himself, flying home, overcome with exhaustion. The last two lines always leave me awed and shaken:

    But I’m waiting for it to fall
    so I can draw close again, the oar clutched in my hands.

Today, it’s the but that stops me in my tracks. It suggests that the speaker doesn’t kill the crane, even in his imagination, because it’s wounded, because it’s exhausted. It makes me think that this act, both violent and tender, isn’t really about putting anything out of its misery, but about defending something so intimate, so intrinsic, that it’s almost unspeakable.

Reader, I don’t know: today I receive this as a poem about making art without knowing why, and about the violence and wonderment that coexist where the making happens. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified. The rest, or most of it, is a mystery.

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Javier Peñalosa M.’s What Comes Back, translated by Robin Myers, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2023.

Writing Prompt

Write a poem about a recent experience as if it had happened many years ago. What changes in the voice of your speaker, or in their relationship to what they have to say?
Robin Myers

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Robin Myers

Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared in Cortland Review, The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, and the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology.