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Prose-poem surprise, morning delight
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I really wanted to post a review of Mike Henry's poetry collection, "No Stranger Than My Own," before posting anything else in this space, but I ran across a prose-poetry delight in Poetry magazine that I could not keep from commenting on this early in the morning.
So a quickie.
The prose poem is called "Coal Deliveryman," by South American poet Ramón Cote Baraibar, and translated by Craig Arnold.
Poetry, in its annual translation issue, offers the translator a page to comment on the poem he or she has turned to English from some foreign language -- in America, one might say 'alien' language -- and Arnold calls Cote's poem part of the poet's paean to Bogatá, the capital city of Colombia, where the "Coal Deliveryman" plies his trade.
"Like opening a Bible and finding three leaves of laurel. Like lifting a stone and remembering someone's name. Like finding the same snail again a hundred miles away. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, would it be to find, fifteen years later, the same coal deliveryman carrying on his trade..., " Arnold translates.
And then the translator tells you why it is fun to translate Spanish to English and how much he appreciates his task. Both the poem and the translation are worth a few moments of your time. Check it out.
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