Translator's Introduction to Prism — Web Exclusive
By Forrest Gander
Born in Mexico City in 1952, Pura López Colomé studied literature at UMAM. She published literary criticism, poems, and translations in a regular column for the newspaper Unomisuno. The author of several important books, including El suefio del cazador, Un Cristol en Otro, Aurora, and Internperie, she is also the translator into Spanish of works by Samuel Beckett, H. D., Seamus Heaney, Gertrude Stein, and others.
Pura López Colomé's own poetry is philosophical and exacting, pared into sharp, dark lines, obsidian flakes. Her imagination, like Celan's, is marked by a kind of moral severity located in language itself; the poems are less concerned with representing the observable surface of life than with tracing the melodies and absences of a spiritual vision. "I have no interest in sincerity," she once told me. "Sincerity and veracity are distinct." Her concerns have necessitated the unconventional approach to language that marks her work, its philosophical tones and its often dialogic form.
"Prism," taken from her most recent book, Intemperie, concerns crossings in various ways. Obviously, the journey the poem describes is a kind of spiritual "crossing over" for the pilgrims who vanish at the poem's end. And it is also a kind of crossing into and out of faith for the speaker who at first envies the community of pilgrims their faith, but who finds on her own not consolation but desolation, "the Lord's stinking breath." Perhaps most of all, the poem involves the sense of the singular crossing over into the multiple and back into the singular, the terror of both.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator. He received an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University and moved to Mexico, where he began to assemble poems and translations for Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women, a bilingual anthology. Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.