Poetry Wednesday: Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m.
Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m.
Dear C, I dropped
your sentence in hot water.
I talked to the boil. I said Here
is my thumb for you to burn.
Here is the soft heart
of my hand and my arm and
the nape of my wreck.
I said vapor, just take me.
I’m done burning
with these pages. Being invisible
doesn’t mean a person
won’t blister, doesn’t mean
the blisters won’t fill
with pockets of water
or when lanced the rawest flesh
won’t emerge. First the word
then the murky leak
begins—what another mind
may scrape against
but never skin.
By Idra Novey
Courtesy poets.org
About this Poem:
“I wrote this poem as a way to settle some unfinished
business I had with Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose work I’d been
reading intensely for nearly a decade and whose novel I’d recently translated.
As is the nature of unfinished business, once I wrote one letter to her, I
needed to write another, and on it went for some time.”
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