There are images that wall off the bodyfrom the violence of the bodythey’re outside memorythey spread out like the strata of an exemplary lifenourished by roe deerin the forests of Brabante /the bloodbath happensTo stand up, reeling in the mistand go off toward somewhereinterminablethe law traversed by the signs that are timeIn the same waythat birds carved in basalt emit from their eyesan emerald pulsarso fragments of language-rockshear off to fly over an oceanstraight at the lot of youwe are the pulsar of birdslinguistic rockall power any virtualityan infinite exposurean infinite painyou don’t get our messages
Sonorous
Chus Pato
Translated from the Galician by Erín Moure
Feature Date
- November 27, 2024
Series
- Translation
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English Copyright © 2024 by Erín Moure.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Chus Pato (b. 1955, Ourense, Galicia) is a celebrated Galician poet. Six of her twelve books of poetry have been translated from Galician into English, all by Erín Moure, most recently In the Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021), and her books have also been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, Portuguese and Bulgarian. In 2015, she became the first Galician poet to be recorded for the archives of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University. Her latest work, Sonora (Xerais, 2023), received the 2024 Spanish National Book Award in poetry and the 2024 Spanish Critics’ Prize for poetry in Galician. She has performed throughout Europe and South America, in Canada and the USA, in Cuba, and in North Africa. Retired from teaching history and geography, she lives in central Galicia, Spain.
Erín Moure is a poet and translator (or co-translator) of poetry from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, and Spanish, and Ukrainian (with Roman Ivashkiv). She has published nineteen books of her own poetry and 30 books of poetry in translation or co-translation. A 40-year retrospective of her work, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University Press. Moure has been awarded the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Awards in both poetry and translation, and has been three times a finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in poetry. Her latest book is Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop and Grimké (Anansi, 2023). She lives in Montréal.
Latrobe, Pennsylvania
"Organized around the translators (rather than the poets), with essays discussing the poetics and politics of their translations, this ground-breaking anthology forms unruly geographical lines of connection rather than underscoring existing national canons—shaping new understandings of contemporary poetry’s transnational commitments.
Featuring some of the most prominent poet-translators from both sides of the Atlantic, Poetry's Geographies radically foregrounds the role of translators as bridge-builders and activists, with a crucial role in revealing the structures through which poetry moves and circulates.
As poet-translator Zoë Skoulding writes in her introduction, this book presents the art of translation as a 'chance to live in the multiplicity of languages and the spaces of relation that it opens up.'"
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