2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Sharon Dolin and Gemma Gorga

Late to the House of Words, Sharon Dolin, translated from the Catalan written by Gemma Gorga
Saturnalia Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (2016), Whirlwind (2012), and Burn and Dodge (2008), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.  She is also the author of a book of translations, Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (2019), and a prose memoir, Hitchcock Blonde (2020).  The recipient of a 2021 NEA Fellowship in Translation, she lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona.

Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968.  She has a PhD in Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature.  She has published seven collections of poetry in Catalan: Ocellania (1977), El desordre de les mans (2003), Instruments òptics (2005), Llibre dels minuts (2006) which won the 2006 Premi Miquel de Palol, Diafragma (2012), Mur (2015); and Viatge al centre (2020).  She is also the author of a prose journal of her time spent in India entitled Indi visible (2018).

I suppose this is a kind of chicken-or-egg question,but what was the process of simultaneously building both a book of translation and a selected poems? Were the poems first gathered for the sake of selection, or for the sake of translation? Were there questions you had to solve that might not have emerged otherwise?

Sharon Dolin: I was already acquainted with Gemma Gorga’s work through my translation of her book of prose poems Llibre dels minuts (2006), which appeared as Book of Minutes in 2019. So when I decided I wanted to continue translating her poems written in lines in 2017, I first began by translating her then most recent book Wall (Mur, 2015), but soon realized that certain poems were more successful in English than others. It then occurred to me that a Selected Poems might be a better idea and so I began to translate poems from her other books. Much of my selection process was by intuition: That is, I read through the poems and decided which ones appealed to me as a reader; then I worked on the translations. If I was not satisfied with the poem in English, I discarded it in favor of another. At some point, I believe early on, I had chosen the title for the collection, Late to the House of Words, a phrase from the poem “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” and that choice led me to make sure I translated any poems that were directly concerned with issues of language. Of course, I had already noticed a preponderance of poems that were in love with words, with the dictionary, with the richness as well as the limits of language, so I intentionally highlighted those poems in this Selected Poems. Gemma Gorga was a delight to work with and seemed very happy with the choices I had made for this selection from her six books.

Gemma Gorga: The book wasn’t conceived as a simultaneous work. Actually, Sharon explained to me her idea of gathering poems from all my previous books and arming a representative anthology. Of course, I couldn’t be more happy and grateful. But, from that moment on, this book was her work: she selected the poems, translated them and wrote a prologue which I think is key to understand the collection. But, as you can see, my role during the process has been rather discreet.

Gemma, having yourself done translation work, how was it seeing your own work shift through translation? How involved were you, if at all, with Sharon through the process?

Gemma Gorga: The first impression is kind of vertigo, like living in a recursive world: while I translate a poet, I’m being translated at the same time by another poet. And while I, doing my own translation, have to solve all the tricky aspects inherent to language, I know that my translator will have to solve this same kind of problems.

But, at the same time, I chose not to be too involved in Sharon’s translation process, because a translator needs a lot of space and freedom of movements. Of course, I tried to answer all her consultations, but without interfering too much in the final solution.

What other Catalan poets should one be reading to further expand upon the context of Gemma Gorga’s work more generally?

Sharon Dolin: I do think it’s important to read the poetry of Francesc Parcerisas, who was one of Gorga’s teachers. About other Catalan poets, I defer to Gorga herself.

Gemma Gorga: Catalan poets are, of course, my closest tradition, my immediate reference. Names such as Joan Vinyoli, Maria Mercè Marçal or Màrius Sampere are the dearest to me, since I grew up as a poet under their shadow. This said, since very young age I was eager to know other traditions, so I began to read as much translated poetry as I could. And this turned out a fundamental school.

Gemma, given your engagement with English-language writing, have you noticed an influence upon your writing in Catalan? Or are you able to keep those trains of thought separated?

Gemma Gorga: I see translation as a great school to learn and improve my own writing. We generally think of translation as a constant struggle with “impossibilities”, while I see it as an infinite source of “possibilities”, a place where I find solutions that I have never thought of before. Being bilingual Catalan-Spanish all my life has taught me to take advantage of the richness that each language contains and has made me realize how interesting it is to build bridges between languages. So I don’t want to keep those trains of thought separated; after all, they are heading to the same place.