Going back as though to touch the votive stone, the feet or hands of the worn image of some miraculous saint:

I found nothing but garbage.
The Lord's mouth agape,
his stinking breath.

I confess to getting lost on occasion as I read López-Colomé's poetry, to following the momentum of a phrase or line and finding myself veering right off the poem as it continues on its tightly drawn path. Suddenly I am, á la Bugs Bunny, reading in the mid-air of the margin. This occurred, for example, when I read this passage from "Los cachorros":

Nubarrones, runas echadas,
este verano sólido,
padre paciente, manantial
de lo que viene ocurriendo
para seguir pasando,
esqueleto del magnífico
lugar común.
Este lugar.

[Storm clouds, thrown runes
this solid summer,
patient father, fountainhead
of what comes on, continuing
what has been,
skeleton of the magnificent
commonplace.
This place.

(from "The Cubs")]

As a good translator must, he holds this conversation at the level of sounds as well. The resonance of n's, u's, and r's in the first line of this passage appears in English as o's, r's, n's, and m's. The two p's of "padre paciente" in the poem's third line become the two f's of "father, fountainhead"-"fountainhead" doing double duty here, being far superior and more evocative than any of the alternatives I can think of. And Gander's use of "commonplace" for "lugar común" is obvious as one reads the stanza, but equally important is that the word precisely reproduces the nested repetition and wordplay of the same lines in the Spanish.In the end, however, the success of this translation lies in the way it flows from "Storm" right down to "place." Gander's choice of sounds and words all serve to create a poetic movement equivalent to that of the original Spanish.

On occasion Gander seems to misread the Spanish, but these instances are minor. For example, in the second part of "To Good Shelter", he translates "Aquel sonido no parece tener eco, / va en su busca,/en busca de la aurora" as "The sound doesn't seem to echo / but veers off, / off toward the dawn". As I read the Spanish, the sound is not veering off toward the dawn, but seeking its own echo, which is also, perhaps the dawn. In the third section of "Death of the Kiss," he writes "I kissed you like a shipwreck". It is a significant l iberty to translate náufrago, a shipwrecked person or castaway, as a shipwreck. The substitution of the ship for the sailor gives the line a clichéd pitch and eliminates the possibility that the narrator is comparing herself to a castaway.

These few awkward moments in Gander's translation are exceptions that prove the very rules he sets for himself in the introduction: to create a faithful translation "where faith is a form of knowledge and belief" and to refresh American English, an act that "may serve also to inoculate readers against a language of manifest destiny, the language of the New York Times." "I kissed you like a shipwreck" is followed by the line "like one who insufflates the word." Beware--translators are taught early--of translating cognates literally, unquestioningly. And here is Gander's translation, not only full of English cognates of Spanish words, but words that many of us would have to look up in a dictionary: "insufflates," "amatory," "excrescencies," "inapprehensible," "circumlocution." But translators, beware also of following rules without question! These words are not common or colloquial in Spanish either, and the poet is clearly choosing them with intention. In five magnificent volumes of his own original poetry, Forrest Gander has proven himself to be a masterful, precise, daring poet, a writer whose work has for years been giving American English vigorous "injections" of new poetic forms, ideas, images, and rhythms, and a resuscitated richness of vocabulary. Which is to say, I come to this book already trusting Gander and his translation, and I find my trust confirmed. I am willing and eager to be inoculated with live insufflates or excrescencies providing I sense that his text is well-grounded in a careful reading of López-Colomé's original. It is.

Here is one more example: In the first part of "The Cubs", the word shorn catches my eye in the line "The tigress in that shorn landscape, under a shrub." A shorn landscape? It's just far enough outside what I would expect that I wonder whether it is the poem that is challenging me (in English) or the translation. So I flip to the Spanish text and find the line: "La tigresa, en aquel árido paisaje, bajo un arbusto." Why, I wonder now, did he translate árido as shorn when surely the cognate serves perfectly well in English? The ultimate strength of Gander's translation derives from the accomplishment of the final goal he sets forth in his introduction: "I aim to recreate, sometimes in different places, the same degree of reader participation in the translation as in the original." And here is a perfect example of the conversation between the translator as reader (Gander) and the reader of translations (I), which I mentioned earlier. As I let his translation speak to me, it underscores the sound of the line in Spanish, the seven as in a row, two of them followed by rs-árido and arbusto. And then I see that by using shrub instead of arid, Gander linked shorn and shrub in English just as árido and arbusto are linked in Spanish, particularly important since there is no way to reproduce the assonance of the Spanish here in English. Not only in my opinion does Gander's translation justify his choices, but driven by the Spanish, his translation helps to revitalize American English at the same time. Now I own shorn again-and anew.

Finally, I am grateful for the organization of this bilingual volume: the complete translation in English followed by the original text in Spanish (in contrast to the standard format of presenting translation and original texts on facing pages.) I firmly believe that the facing-page format should be reserved for bilingual volumes specifically designed for the study of the two texts. When I opened this book and found page after page of English and then the original poems in Spanish afterward, I relaxed intellectually and physically with the knowledge that I could read the translation on its own terms without having to constantly check it against the Spanish, and vice-versa. To set the two texts (literally) against each other is to proclaim on every page "This Is That". Of course one could read each text separately, but how many of us ever do even when we decide to? The traditional bilingual format practically demands that every reading be a comparative reading. I am a translator and a poet, and I certainly love to compare translations with their originals for reasons ranging from editorial obsession to linguistic inquisitiveness. Nevertheless, I think that the facing-page format diminishes each text for the reader, diminishes the trust the reader might have or build in each text and its respective author. So I was relieved when I opened this book. I read Forrest Gander's translation with all the pleasure and questions it produced in me, only occasionally flipping to the Spanish. Pura López-Colomé's poetry in Forrest Gander's English! And then I read López-Colomé's poems in Spanish, only occasionally flipping back to the English to satisfy one curiosity or another. And then I read Gander again--and then López-Colomé. My reading of this book has become an ongoing conversation in which each person has his or her turn to speak and to listen, myself included.