Gemma Gorga

Translator’s Note

Gemma Gorga’s poems are often self-reflexive. That is, the poems themselves are often keenly aware of themselves as artifacts that the poet is in the act of creating. In “Listen,” from her most recent book Voyage to the Center (Viatge al centre, 2020), Gorga foregrounds the act of writing as being, perhaps, in conflict with the grass “speaking.” A reader wonders, along with the poet, if the very act of writing or reading the poem in front of us is what somehow keeps us from hearing the voice of the grass. And yet it is, paradoxically, the poem itself that draws our attention to the grass’ speech, even if it is only to point to it as something the poet has missed. Somewhere behind this poem surely lies Whitman and his famous question voiced by a child, “What is the grass?” And somewhere behind this double language lies the allegory of the Catalan language itself, which for thirty-six years was suppressed and officially silenced under Franco’s regime.

In translating such a minimalist poem into English, I felt the white space of the poem was as crucial as the words themselves. Perhaps the speech of the grass is imminent in those gaps between stanzas and in the white space at the end of each line. I strove to preserve the delicacy and simplicity of the original poem, its unfolding mystery that reveals itself by its ending, making us equal participants in the act of missing and encountering nature’s speech.

Listen

Full

of the sweet
saliva left by
the dew

the grass is on the verge of speaking.

Or perhaps it has spoken already
and I, distracted by the poem,
failed to hear it.

Escolta

L’herba,

plena de la saliva
dolça que li ha deixat
la rosada,

és a punt de parlar.

O potser ja ha parlat
i, distreta amb el poema,
jo no l’he sentida.