Visual description:
A gif featuring images of small square pieces of paper (some blue, some light brown, some white notebook paper with blue lines). Each frame of the gif has a photo of my left hand holding a stack of square pieces of paper, and you can slightly see the edges of the other pieces of paper lower down in the stack. In the background is a tilted spread from the chapbook THE BAT KING where there are a few interspersed words but mostly unreadable text formed from commas, "O"s, and some other punctuation marks. In the poem those unreadable bits mimic layers of soil and sediment underground. Every 9 seconds the gif shifts to a new image and it cycles infinitely.
Textual transcription:
Title
page:
9
Notes
a
short reflection
in
short fragments
by
Ryan Greene
Fragment 1:
I've been working with Yaxkin to translate the first three books in his project "THE NEW WORLD" since the end of 2019/start of 2020. I first started reading his poems in 2015 or 2016.
Fragment 2:
Still, after all this time, his poems catch me by surprise. I think I know where we're going, and then suddenly we're somewhere I don't know if I've been before.
Fragment 3:
That sense of disorientation feels a bit heightened with a chapbook like "THE BAT KING" which was plucked from a much larger work, a book called "THE GREEN SUN."
Fragment 4:
In those moments of not knowing where I am or how I got there, I wonder why I ever expected to know in the first place. Do we ever really know?
Fragment 5:
As a translator, I often think about how expectations of "correctness" can distract from the work of honoring a feeling of not knowing.
Fragment 6:
Maybe another way to say that is that I want to put my energy toward honoring and listening to the contours of ambiguity.
Fragment 7:
I don't want to feel tricked into providing (only) "clarity." Or, I don't want "correctness" to be my only metric.
Fragment 8:
Part of what I love most about Yaxkin's poem is the way they seem to hold room for an honest multiplicity.
Fragment 9:
Life and its interconnected complexities dance across scales, timelines, and realities. Yaxkin's poems remind me it's all fractal. Alive.
Gratitude page:
Thx to rob for the invitation to write this reflection in celebration of the late-summer release of EL REY MURCIÉLAGO (THE BAT KING) by Yaxkin Melchy with above/ground press :heart emoji
Ryan Greene [photo credit: Dennis Dominguez] writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. For the past several years he has been working with Yaxkin Melchy to translate the first three books of THE NEW WORLD. He’s learning.
