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I will continue to post my translated poetry index links here:
* A new article on how to get started reading translated poetry
* Listings for publications, awards, publishers, and translators.
* And general improvements to navigability for searching for contemporary poetry in translation by country or language.
I admitted at the beginning of the stream that I try to schedule these readings for when I’m alone in the house. There is something deeply humiliating about sitting alone in a room and reading poems into a webcam. Not performing them exactly. Not even interpreting them. Just… reading. To a machine.
But maybe that’s part of the point.
There is no applause in that setup. No stage. No visible audience breathing with you. Just language moving through air and into circuitry. It strips the act down to something closer to what poetry actually is most of the time: one person alone with words, hoping they hold.
This week I moved through Greece, Hungary, Argentina, Uruguay, South Korea, China. Not as a tour. Not as a theme. Just what happened to be on my desk. What I’ve been carrying around in my head.
The Greek poems were full of birds and sky — but not pastoral comfort. Birds as arrows. Sky as glass that tears your flesh. The Hungarian poems felt like insomnia turned violent, the brain overheating at 4:30 a.m., revolution simmering in the dark. Pizarnik, as always, gave that clean, terrifying permission to ask: who is the “I” speaking when I say “I”? Vilariño compressed entire emotional collapses into ten lines. And then Lee Min-ha fed her own eyes to a mirror and asked us to follow.
There’s something I’ve been circling lately: I don’t need to understand a poem in order to be altered by it.
The South Korean work especially resists paraphrase. Drawers opening in flesh. Salmon roe pouring from mirrors. Mothers turning into trees. I could spend an hour trying to decode those images, or I can admit the simpler truth: they stick. Weeks later, they are still lodged somewhere behind my eyes. That is a kind of success.
I’ve also noticed I’ve been reading shorter and shorter poems. I don’t think that’s a trend. I think it’s stamina. The world feels loud and fast and extractive. A forty-line poem can feel like a demand. A ten-line poem can feel like oxygen. Vilariño’s numbered fragments barely take up space on the page, but they hit like clean blows: I want. I do not want. I endure. I forget myself. What is that?
There’s something honest about small poems right now. They don’t pretend to solve anything. They flare and vanish.
I said during the stream that sometimes poetry gives permission to ask questions about yourself that nothing else quite authorizes. Not in a therapeutic way. Not in a tidy way. Just the raw question: who are you when the room is quiet? Who are you when the productivity stops? Who are you when you are only language?
Maybe that’s why reading into a computer feels embarrassing. There’s no spectacle to hide behind. It’s just you and the words. If they fail, you feel it immediately. If they hold, you feel that too.
I don’t know if these weekly readings will continue forever. I suspect they won’t. But for thirty or forty minutes, they create a small pocket of time where nothing is being optimized, nothing is being sold, and nothing is being resolved.
Just language, moving.
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