Translator’s Confession, 3 a.m.
Dear C, I dropped
your sentence in hot water.
I talked to the boil. I said Here
is my thumb for you to burn.
Here is the soft heart
of my hand and my arm and
the nape of my wreck.
I said vapor, just take me.
I’m done burning
with these pages. Being invisible
doesn’t mean a person
won’t blister, doesn’t mean
the blisters won’t fill
with pockets of water
or when lanced the rawest flesh
won’t emerge. First the word
then the murky leak
begins—what another mind
may scrape against
but never skin.
Copyright @ 2014 by Idra Novey. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on May 13, 2014.
“I wrote this poem as a way to settle some unfinished business I had with Clarice Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose work I’d been reading intensely for nearly a decade and whose novel I’d recently translated. As is the nature of unfinished business, once I wrote one letter to her, I needed to write another, and on it went for some time.”
—Idra Novey
Idra Novey
Idra Novey is the author of several novels and poetry collections, including Soon & Wholly (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012), selected for the National Poetry Series by Patricia Smith.