"In the Shadow of the Word Sung From My Lips: Gemma Gorga's Poetry, by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

“In the Shadow of the Word sung from my lips”: Gemma Gorga’s Poetry Translated by Sharon Dolin

Daniel A. Rabuzzi Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga, translated by Sharon Dolin, Saturnalia Books, 2021.

Gemma Gorga’s metaphysical meditations get the translation they so richly deserve by Sharon Dolin in this handsomely produced bilingual edition from Saturnalia Books. Winner of the inaugural Malinda A. Markham Memorial Translation Prize, Late To The House of Words offers sixty-two poems from six books written in Catalan, published between 1997 and 2020. Dolin— perhaps known to New Letters readers as a luminary poet in her own right—has given Anglophones a great gift with her limber, sure-footed translation: a thorough and thoughtful introduction to Gorga’s precise, at times austere, observations on the nature of meaning and the challenge of understanding through language.

Gorga’s compact stanzas are a revelation, summoning with one atomistic image an immensity of potential meaning.

For instance, in the thirty-three lines of “Stones,” she unfurls from the word “scorpion” the memory of her father’s loving admonition when she was six years old, the simple non-secretive but still unexpected nature of mortality, her first encounter with the definition of “scorpion” in a natural history book, her later realization that textbooks cannot comprehend the whole concept of a being, the similarity of the phone to the stones that her

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father warned her to check under, the phone call bringing news of his death.

Gorga’s ability to create a universe from an atom is selfconsciously demiurgic. A leitmotif in her poems is the poet’s capacity to shape meaning from the inchoate, along with the responsibility such power entails. Tellingly, the second poem in the collection is “Verbal Alchemy,” which opens with: From clay I create a word that endures.

From clay, from water, from the split reality that slowly matures in the shadow of the word sung from my lips.

Echoes of Väinämöinen in the Kalevala, of Blake and Stevens, and of course Genesis, but Gorga goes them all one better, creating a new Adam as a baker kneads bread in “So Then She”: “With flour and water she worked / his body. [ . . . ] / . . . bread that was his body, / bread that fit as well in her hands / as does light on earth.”

Gorga highlights the choices creators make, putting into sharp relief the silence that envelops the word, the dark matter that cradles creation—in English her peers in such delineation include Le Guin, Davis, Beachy-Quick, Stevens, and Hirschfield (and Bonnefoy in Hoyt Rogers’ translation). As Dolin notes during a November 7th, 2021 reading with Gorga (bit.ly/3Ha4fl6): “poems are not just the words that are there but they also gesture at the silences, the white spaces, to the absences.” Gorga calls the words that do not appear “radioactive submarines / beneath the clear text of the sea” (in “Radar”). She goes further still, pushing the poet to excise words in the search for unalloyed essence: “. . . how many syllables must I remove / to make a perfect haiku from my life?” (in “Reading Matsuo Basho”).” Yet more stringent are her words in “Autobiography”:

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“After saying, unsay.” And in “Decreation”: “leave verses unfinished, / leave verses, / leave.” Her trajectory reaches its logical end in “Radiance”: “erasing myself / with stunning / intensity.” Gorga’s self-effacement commands continued exploration—the creator has departed the premises but left the clockwork humming. She chalks for us silhouettes of meaning within an endless minimalist grid, leaving us as fascinated as when we fall into an Agnes Martin painting or a Lenore Tawney design.

Such a verbal vanishing act would test any translator. Dolin meets the challenge brilliantly. For instance, in “Verbal Alchemy,” quoted above, she captures Gorga’s “Del fang en faig paraula que perdura” (note the paired assonance and the meter) with “From clay I create a word that endures.” The first stanza’s end-rhymes in the original (“perdura”/ “madura”; “realitat” / “cantat”) cannot be wholly matched in English, given differing rules governing adjective placement. Dolin’s solution is deft: “split” / “lips” is nearly palindromic. Dolin consistently recreates in English Gorga’s shamanic incantations—same spell, different cloak. For example, in “Calidoscopi,” Gorga writes “a les paraules / trobades / torbades / tornades,” which Dolin renders in “Kaleidoscope” as “to the words / received / deceived / retrieved.”

Gorga and Dolin collaborated closely on the project, producing something new while emphasizing the strength of the original. That the original is in Catalan makes Late to the House of Words all the more important, given that language’s suppression under Franco and its need to withstand the everincreasing dominance of world tongues such as Spanish and English. Perhaps Gorga’s crystalline attention to word choice and the metaphysics of meaning stems in part from the history and current context of Catalan. Perhaps speakers within smaller language communities are (forced to be?) more aware of the

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linguistic clay they work daily, as opposed to those complacently, carelessly, or arrogantly mining the technocratic ore of global linguistic standards (the “universal uproar— / open twenty-four hours a day,” as “Thousands of Winged Creatures Cross The Night” puts it). If so, we need more translations in bilingual editions from Catalan (and Finnish and Mayan and Akan and so on), not only to hold up brilliance in that language but to help native speakers of Spanish and English better find and create meaning in their own languages.