What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
They are sleeping, mountain-heads, headlands, and the gullies, too— the fallen leaves and the tribe of slow-footed creatures the dark earth grows— beasts of prey mountain-bred and brood of wild bees and the brute monsters deep in the deep purple seas: and that flock of omen-giving birds long-winged, they are sleeping, too.
"Studying my declensions, conjugating those verbs, the endless rote memorization of vocabulary, all felt meaningful in relation to this wild, instinctive possibility—that thinking was the body’s work, that apprehension in all its senses (grasping, fearing, knowing) was the thinking poetry could offer, a thought that is a sensation, as natural and instinctive as the hawk’s dive is to hawk or the mouse’s hiding is to the mouse, all eyes bright with purpose."
"Because I am no art expert, although I have studied the classics, I want to try to think about Twombly through the poems of Catullus. These two spirits seem to me somehow in tune. Erudite allusion mixed with earthy expression features in the work of both.
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