Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (2022), 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 two poetry books in translation from Catalan, Gemma Gorga’s Late to the House of Words (Saturnalia Books, 2021), shortlisted for the 2022 International Griffin Poetry Prize, and Book of Minutes (2019). 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 teaches poetry workshops.
Judges’ Citation
Sharon Dolin’s superb translation from Catalan reveals the power of this historically suppressed language, in the hands of a masterful poet, to offer new ways to understand the world where ‘home is the incorruptible verticality of the wind,’ or ‘the moisture every leaf imagines,’ or ‘the dignity of the body’.
Selected poems
by Sharon Dolin
We showed up late to the house of words.
Now we grope our way down stairs as painful
as vertebrae and search between the wall’s plastered
shards for some living syllable—sister to bread
and poverty—to bring our lips.
Such as a name, a woman’s name.
The bone of a woman’s name lost between the stones
of these walls that once upon a time housed
flesh inside. And perhaps a jewel
a little box
a mirror you could ask
so many things.
Copyright © 2021 Gemma Gorga, © 2021 Sharon Dolin (English translation and introduction), Late to the House of Words, Saturnalia Books
Mirror, Mirror On the Wall
the Catalan written by Gemma Gorga
The leaf falls to the ground and decomposes
into smaller meanings—moisture, pigment,
lamina, oxygen, heat, light—the way
someone spells out their full name
to a stranger: car-bon di-ox-ide.
Nothing is lost along the way, neither
its conversations with the night rain
nor flying lessons given by birds: it all
decomposes into smaller units directly
assimilated by patient ants, the silent mouths
of the forest. That’s why the language
of the wind also comes to be spoken
underground. That’s why worms try on wings
and fly away, turned into butterflies. Everything
is matter. Everything is transformed into flight
when a simple leaf falls to the ground.
Copyright © 2021 Gemma Gorga, © 2021 Sharon Dolin (English translation and introduction), Late to the House of Words, Saturnalia Books
Semantics and Nutrition
the Catalan written by Gemma Gorga