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Caesura

 

Com aquella pausa

interminable,

 

quan s’acaba la nit

i no arriba encara l’alba:

 

qui sóc

 

a l’entremig 

de sístole i diàstole.

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Caesura

 

Like that endless

pause,

 

when night is over

and dawn has not yet arrived:

 

who I am—

 

in between 

systole and diastole.

 

 

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La transformació dels amants

 

Llavors va preguntar-li

si podia un corb 

tornar-se blanc

 

de tant 

tossudament

delitosament

llastimosament

 

mirar la neu.

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The Transformation of Lovers

 

 

Then she asks him

if a raven could

turn white

 

stubbornly

pleasurably

pitifully

from so intently

 

looking at the snow.

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                                                                                          —translated from Catalan by Sharon Dolin

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Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968. She has a Ph.D. in Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature. She has published seven collections of poetry in Catalan. Her most recent collections are Mur (Barcelona: Meteora, 2015), which won the Premi de la Critica de Poesia Catalana, and Viatge al centre (Barcelona: Godall Edicions, 2020).

 

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). She is the author of a prose memoir Hitchcock Blonde (Terra Nova Press, 2020) and a book of translations from Catalan, Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019). Her translation Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga has just won the Malinda A. Markham Memorial Translation Prize and will be published by Saturnalia Books in the fall of 2021. The recipient of a 2021 NEA Fellowship in Translation, she lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona.

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