I’m trying to ease back into the arduous process of translating. Gently, one poem at a time, which pretty much means one word at a time then one line at a time then one stanza at a time and then, with any luck, one poem.

Here’s a first pass at a literal translation of one of Shez’s poems from “Dance of the Lunatic” that I didn’t have time to include in my MFA manuscript:

The Car

My dead come quietly to the tombstone rocks above my body

Sometimes they take a tea break and sit above my body drinking
in an orderly fashion
Sometimes they deviate from the rules
and one of them kills a cigarette
not during an intermission

For years they’ve promised me a car,
not large, not new, not fast,
and they do so again tonight

I feel already how I through landscapes rocky
am flying at fifty miles an hour