Two Lines 16: Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed
Out of Print
Night was paper, and we were ink:
— “Did you draw a face, or a stone?”
When I translate, which is most days, I am always trying to capture, reproduce, become the author’s voice, and when I read translations, what I look for is a voice, one that I want to listen to, a voice that convinces in English. My selection of prose pieces for this volume of Two Lines was guided by that desire to be convinced, and what I thought would be an impossible taks was, it turned out, very easy. I just listened and chose those voice I most wanted to carry on hearing. —MARGARET JULL COSTA
“A map crumpled like politics— / torn and sullied like the ethics of nation states.—” writes Kurdish poet Sherko Bekes in Choman Hardi’s translation. The map, for the poets in this volume, is sometimes the record of a diasporic and ongoing journey, even for those who are not, like Bekes’s speaker, in some kind of exile….All these poems [in this issue of Two Lines], of origins and blurring, now have new roots as poems in English, thanks to their translator’s inspired and judicious gardening. —MARILYN HACKER