From draft to draft, I see the translator’s tension headache, a grind of molars.Despierto entonces de mi propio grito, the close of Gabriela Mistral’s poem “Dormida.” Awaken myself with my own screaming Langston Hughes translates at first. Eventually, he realizes: notscreamingbut crying! Awaken myself with my own crying! A familiar thrill: archive. A striptease as old journals unveil sweet nothings. Near my sublet, a young man hollering mami could be interpreted as a gesture of belonging. I slurp an helado in front of CTown as thunder claps in the distant rain. My first night in Fair Haven, I woke up crying, alone again with a stipend but no friends. My second night, I woke up screaming, Revision, the difference between sensations which lurch us from sleep. I knew then how mi propio grito woke me. I had no son. No home. No world. Only a pencil. Only my hand caring about such trifles. I rock the raw meat of my body, and my pulse mills the beat of an affect translated through me, a feeling we all know, yet remains, somehow, untranslated.
Alone in the Beinecke with Langston Hughes
poetry
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