Folded
translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey and Garth Greenwell
That was the most surprising thing
about writing in summer, there was
a slip of paper folded many times
in the urn of my head
and the trick was to know
how to unfold it carefully
avoiding any hullabaloo
that might tear it
while it spread out and out
until finally
fully revealed
it was impossible to take it all in.
Plegado
Eso fue lo más asombroso
de escribir en el verano, había
un papelito plegado muchas veces
en la urna de mi cabeza
y consistía la cosa
en saber desplegarlo con cuidado,
sin aspavientos
que pudiesen romperlo
mientras se descubría
más y más grande al punto
de que ya revelado
era imposible recorrerlo del todo.
Copyright © 2026 by Luis Muñoz, translated by Idra Novey and Garth Greenwell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 8, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Sometimes, when I’m in a period of writing poems, a single, recurring image comes to embody the process for me, becoming a happy obsession, a continuous, stimulating surprise. ‘Folded’ emerges from the image that predominated when I was writing during the summer of 2025 in my hometown—Granada, [Spain]—after the academic year in Iowa. It’s a visual version of my most palpable experience of writing—in the etymological sense of experience, of passing through dangers: the disproportion between something that begins small and concrete and then, once realized, expands until it’s an unmanageable field.”
—Luis Muñoz
Luis Muñoz
