by Gemma Gorga | Translated by Sharon Dolin
from the Book of Minutes
It could just be this. It could be God goes around pouring salt into human
beings, trying to determine their saturation point, the line above which they
can no longer tolerate any more pain and they precipitate to the bottom of the
container, suddenly heavy as a sandbag. It could be it happened just like this,
throughout human history: a miscalculation of salt and sand.
Translated from the Catalan by Sharon Dolin.
Gemma Gorga has published six collections of poetry, including Llibre dels minuts (Book of Minutes, Barcelona, 2006), which won the Premi Miquel de Palol, and Mur (Wall, Barcelona, 2015), which won the Premi de la Critica de Poesia Catalana. Her other recent books include her essay on India, Indi Visible (Barcelona, 2018) as well as her own translation from English to Catalan of a book of poems by the contemporary Indian poet Dilip Chitre: Vint esmorzars cap a la mort (Twenty Breakfasts to Death, Vic, 2012). She is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona.
Sharon Dolin is the author of six poetry collections: Manual for Living (2016) and Whirlwind (2012), both from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2015 reissue); Burn and Dodge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry; Realm of the Possible (Four Way Books, 2004); and Heart Work (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). She received a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for her translation of Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019). She lives in New York City and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona each June.