Tuesday poem #102 : Chus Pato (trans Erín Moure) : Goal

from Flesh of Leviathan, translated from Galician by Erín Moure

You disappear

they

mermaids

sing

“we’ll miss our connection we’ll miss our connection

we’ll miss”

it’s a powerful song in its error

and arid and persuasive

but the voice

exactly like that of stammering girls

of those in the throes of dying

recorded voices

those of apparitions

those of the newborn

the song’s not

human

(completely)

What I write is the vanishing

into the body that the voices dictate

into its possibility

I write the voice as if a foreign country

“we’ll miss the train we’ll miss we’ll miss

we’d rather sleep here we’d rather”

They

mermaids who travel

we’d abandon the oars

and all government

lashed to the mast

Galician poet Chus Pato’s (Ourense, 1955—) sixth book, m-Talá, broke the poetic mould in Galicia in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her pentalogy Decrúa (Tilth or Arable), received the 2008 Spanish Critics’ Prize, and the Losada Diéguez Prize in 2009. She was voted 2013 Author of the Year by the Galician Booksellers' Association. One of the most revered and iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. Secession (BookThug 2014) is her fourth book to be translated into English (all by Erín Moure) and her first published in Canada. Her most recent book and the final volume of the pentalogy, Flesh of Leviathan, will appear in Moure's English translation from the US press Omnidawn in 2016.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan