Summer Intern Aviva Palencia interviews translator Aga Gabor da Silva, winner of our annual Chametzky Translation Prize for her translation of Ewa Lipska’s “Can Always Happen” from its original Polish. Published in our Spring 2021 issue, Gabor da Silva’s masterfully translates this poem about longing for one’s country of origin. A transcript of this interview is available here.
Aviva also conducted an interview with...
Evelina looked for peace and quiet.
To find it, she woke up before everybody else: before her father who had to get to the fields an at early hour, before her mother and grandmother who had chores to do, before her older siblings who went to school, and before the younger ones who slept late.
Sometimes she even woke up before the rooster; she’d sit by the window in her room and look out at Candelara.
—from "Evelina and the Fairies," Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first published translation was Carlo Lucarelli’s noir, Almost Blue, for City Lights, in 2001. The story behind how this project came about is quite charming. A total...
“‘C’mon, ladies. It’s not fun for me either,’ Marina called. ‘Bend over and touch your toes.’ The wet nurses complied, their rumps rising up in a line of mottled curved. The lights weighed on them, all nude except for cotton underwear.”
—from, “The Milkmaid,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
For some reason poetry arrived before fiction. I wrote a poem about a tractor covered in snow when I was eight that is surprising because generally that’s not an eight-year-old’s go-to. I might have peaked then as a poet. Though, to be honest, I often look back at pieces I wrote as a kid and I hope desperately that I held onto...
It could happen. Once it happens.
Earlier, later. Closer today
but not to you. You’ll survive
because you ran, because you hid.
Because you were first. Because last.
Because alone. Because the others.
—from “Mass Shootings Are Actually Pretty Rare, But Here’s What to Do If You’re Ever in One,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
What inspired you to write this piece?
For a few years, I’d been writing poems linked to guns and gun violence in America. While doing some online research into mass shooting preparedness, I stumbled upon an article in Self Magazine with a title that I borrowed verbatim for my poem: “Mass Shootings Are Actually Pretty Rare, But Here's...
“It is the usual disposition of corners, to be polyvocal, and so, between the voices of future morbidities and past registers, I contribute my current grammar to the orchestra of echoes.”
—from “In This Small Place,” Volume 63, Issue 2 (Summer 2022)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I must have been around 11 or 12 when I wrote a poem about PawPaw. It was the first time I remember actually constructing a poem line by line. I entered it into a children’s poetry competition that was hosted by the national library and surprisingly won. I actually still have the book I won, it’s called Poetry Speaks to Children and has poems by Rita Dove, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes to name a...
