![]() ![]() I wonder how much of it is poetry and how much of it is prose missing pieces. ![]() There are at times gaps in the poetry, spaces where we are clearly missing context and we need to fill in our own cues, at some points this means there are letters missing from a word, at other times entire words, sentences, perhaps even paragraphs gone. The poetry of these books flows between what seem at first glance to be insurmountable walls of text to pages with words and fragments scattered across them, the thoughts of the speaker wandering from page to page in a way that comes across as both meandering and frantic as the text is composed of a kind of poetic prose that all comes together to tell a story. This is not a new problem, but it is nevertheless a problem that I think Shorsha Sullivan handles masterfully in the translation of the Z213: Exit, the first book in the Poena Damni trilogy. Often a single word will stand alone, though perhaps accompanied by fragments of a sentence, and it is the task of the translator to imbue the meaning of that word or fragment into different words in the target language. ![]() ![]() The tricky thing about translating poetry is that poems often rely on the singular meaning of a word. ![]()
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