What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series focused on Translationa group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Celia Dropkin
Translated from the Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, & Samuel Solomon
A fear was growing
in my heart: I smelled
the putrid odor of my grave
around me. The new, silken
drapes on the door silently regretted
my coming death: Soon
we will remain without you.
How stupid that I prepare
for death with silk.
With strange sadness I thought
that I would not have any silk curtains
or even any underwear of silk
in my earthy alcove.
Suddenly I said to myself:
your limbs are like limbs carved
from ivory. My terror
dispersed like smoke.
I was sheltered from death.
from the book THE ACROBAT / Tebot Bach
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Color image of the cover of the translation of Celia Dropkin's The Acrobat
What Sparks Poetry:
Jennifer Kronovet on Celia Dropkin's "A Fear Growing in My Heart"

"Brazenness, surprise at my own flagrant flowering, disgust and enthrallment with my physical transformations, and a bloody lust: all of these things that Dropkin experienced, I have been able to experience on her terms, through them. Would I have known how to without her words? Would I have known how to come through the other side dripping with lyric instead of wrecked by frameless feeling?"
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Color photograph of Nadja Spiegelman, editor of Astra Magazine
When Creative Freedom and a Budget isn't Enough

"Astra Magazine, Spiegelman said, was 'both unusual and exciting, a glamorous and subversive literary project, a breath of fresh air and hope.' And then it was over, leaving fewer places in the United States to publish and read new fiction. Its short existence offers insight both into what is possible for a literary magazine to accomplish and into the tenuous place such publications occupy in the American publishing landscape."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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