"A allò que és fet, pit"
15 d’abril 2008
04 d’abril 2008
"Much of the work was mechanical, and because I was the servant of the text and not its creator, it demanded a different kind of energy from the one I had put into writing The Silent World. Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot. With close to a million words in front of me, I was prepared to work as long and as hard as necessary, even if it meant burning down the house."
01 d’abril 2008
Teitur
20 de març 2008
Eel Tail
Alice Oswald
those short lead lengths of eels
that hide at low tide
those roping and wagging,
preliminary, pre-world creatures, cousins of the moon,
who love blackness, aloofness,
always move under cover of the unmoon
and then as soon as you see them
gone
untranslatable hissed interruptions
unspeakable wide chapped lips
it’s the wind again
cursing the water and when it clears
you keep looking and looking for those
underlurkers, uncontrolled little eddies,
when you lever their rooves up
they lie limbless hairless
like the bends of some huge plumbing system
sucking and sucking the marshes and
sometimes its just a smirk of ripples
and then as soon as you see them
gone
untranslatable hissed interruptions
unspeakable wide chapped lips
it’s the wind again
bothering the reeds and when it clears
you keep looking and looking for those
backlashes waterwicks
you keep finding those sea-veins still
flowing, little cables of shadow, vanishing
dream-lines long roots of the penumbra
but they just drill down into gravel and
dwindle as quick as drips
and then as soon as you see them
gone
untranslatable hissed interruptions
unspeakable wide chapped lips
it’s the wind again
pushing on your ears and when it clears
sometimes you see that whip-thin
tail of a waning moon start
burrowing back into blackness
and then as soon as you see her
and then as soon as you say so
gone















