Gemma Gorga

TRANS. BY SHARON DOLIN

Small Ceremony For Nothing

At dusk, the wind returns home
tired and undresses all the words
it has heard. Such as a tree in winter.
A burned book. Such as me about you.
Contemplating ourselves alone in the glass, 
nothing but water between the eyes and gaze. 
Remaining face to face with our own name, 
so strange, with our own skeleton questioning us.
And getting up slowly, and saving the cold
in the storage room, and still having
a lifetime to prepare a cup of tea:
to squeeze out the last drops of silence,
acidic and far away as silver spoons.

Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968. She has a PhD in Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she teaches Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature. She has published seven books of poetry since 1997, most recently Mur (Barcelona: Meteora, 2015) and Viatge al centre (Barcelona: Godall Edicions, 2020).

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (Pittsburgh,  2016) and a prose memoir, Hitchcock Blonde (Terra Nova, 2020). A 2021 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Translation, her translation of Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2021.