Erín Moure on Translating Lupe Gómez From the Galician

An excerpt from Erín Moure's translation of Galician poet Lupe Gómez's collection, Camouflage (Circumference Books, 2019), is up at Poetry Society of America. The feature includes Moure's thinking on the process: "I didn't actually plan to translate Camouflage at all," she writes. "I only wanted to spend time inhabiting these poems I deeply loved, held in a book whose sinews and quiet unity drew me irrevocably and brought me close to my own maternal source." More:

...Translating was the way that I found to extend my reading, which so astonished me the first time I pored over the book, as in the book there were echoes for me of my own rural mother (though not rural, I am of a maternal rural caste, equal to the grasses and no more) and of Rosalía de Castro, flower of Galician language poetry in the 19th century, whom I have also translated. To honor the steadfast praxis of a rural mother is to understand poiesis itself and thus politics—politics and feminism, action and making, resistance to assimilation and decay.

What Gómez's poetry brings us is not property or proper. It is the inappropriable and exorbitant [2]—the body, women's bodies [3]— held momentarily in language which is all at once of the self and of the other and of what I call other-being, which is to say: being oneself because of being among others. Here in the regard of this other-being—in something that is relational and cannot be appropriated—we find community. Via community we learn and enact common use: that which is not owned but which unites us. On the contrary, if we only speak of and from ownership, from an ethos of accumulation—something we learn so well in Western society it is hard to think outside it—the common is camouflaged, vanishes...