Monday, November 21, 2016

"no dream. no dreamer."

nary an hour passes when some fragment of me
doesn't range back across the years - decades now -
in search of communion with hours lauded even then.
this high ceiling is not the same as that
of those liminal years, cannot even
pass itself off as such.
the trappings are all wrong, the bodies
(mine included)
bear no resemblance to those imagined
or dreaded or anticipated.

the fanged, tartared maw of history
stretches wide, cold as midsummer AC
and unforgiving as the thousands
and thousands
and thousands of cigarettes
this corpse in waiting has consumed.

no remorse, as metallica taught me:
not just for the smokes, but the carpeted nights
and the internet searches,
the sleep terrors and the shiner bock, the
extension of consciousness beyond
what speech and flesh and warm concrete
could only point to ("god" bless them all).

nary an hour passes when some fragment of me
doesn't range forward in time - entire minutes and hours -
in search of the new liminal,
moments when words like lucid dreams
arise among the living, the awake
and inevitably point back to the past,
beyond ceilings,
beyond bodies, beyond concerns,
beyond AC.
as if such a simple horizon was all there was to it.







Friday, November 11, 2016

Muse India: Goan Literature in Portuguese

At long last, the issue of Muse India dedicated to Goan literature in Portuguese has been released, and I'm pleased to announce that several of my translations of Laxmanrao Sardessai's poems have been included. You can, and should, check it out here.

In late summer 2015 Dr. Paul Melo e Castro, one of the editors of this particular issue, contacted me after reading my translation of Laxmanrao Sardessai's "O mistério aclara-se" and asked if I'd be interested in contributing. I was, and what started as a handful of translations for Muse India has become a much larger project: I've translated what I believe to be all of Sardessai's poetry, and the collection should see the light of day soon. I'll provide more details once they're nailed down, but suffice to say I'm excited. (Have I posted this before? It feels like I have. Apologies for any redundancy.)

There's another project in the works, too, but that one hinges on some complicated issues, so I'll refrain from doing much more than acknowledging its existence at the moment.

Well, back to work. Enjoy the new issue of Muse India. Portuguese-language writing in Goa, even before 1961, was rather sparse, and time certainly hasn't changed that. Nevertheless, I think it offers a pretty fascinating glance not just at daily life in the oldest European colony in Asia before and after Liberation, but the relationship between colonist and colonized, and how identities- religious, national, ethnic- are formed and, ultimately, brought to the brink of extinction.

Obrigado, caro/a leitor/a!

DAS