Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

This post is yet another one about translation. One of the two languages in my genetic heritage is Swedish. Like my mother’s Italian, my father was never taught his parent’s immigrant language. Its an all too common story from previous generations (is it different now? I hope it is different) that in order to assimilate into their new country, immigrants let their languages go. The only time I ever heard Swedish in the house was when my father got just drunk enough to call his mother up and argue on the phone with her. The cadence and tone and vocabulary that lies alongside English that lives so close to comprehension yet tantalizingly far makes me feel closer to Swedish in some senses than even the French of my childhood public education.

As I’ve written before, the magic of reading poetry is translation is like diving into a new swimming pool. You’ve swam in water before, just not this water. You don’t know before you jump what the temperature is going to be. The balance between salt and chlorine is going to smell and taste different. The different dimensions and depths of the walls and floor means you don’t know how the water is going to move around you. It is a new way of being, if even for a short time. You’re not you when you’re reading poetry in translation.

In this issue of “Poetry” for the first time, I came across poetry translated from a language that should have been a large part of my life but that wasn’t. I love the poems by Tomas Tranströmer that appear here. I am going to seek out more. This is why magazines like “Poetry” exist and why it is so important for us to keep supporting them.

If you follow me over on BlueSky, you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. Here is a short stanza from the poem “Seeing Through The Ground” by Tomas Tranströmer translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane:

Where decisions are made. The bones of the dead
cant be told from those of the living

The sunlight intensifies and spreads, flooding
into aircraft cabins and peapods