Confessions of a Reading Machine by Wisława Szymborska
translated by Clare Cavanagh
am renowned for my vast linguistic knowledge.
I now recognize thousands of languages
employed by extinct people
in their histories.
Everything that they recorded with their signs,
even when crushed under layers of disasters,
I extract, reconstruct
in its original form.
and now, skipping seven very fine stanzas (BUY THE BOOK!) to the final one, we have
Perhaps my pal Two Fifths of Zero Fractured by Half
will provide brotherly assistance.
True, he's a known lunatic,
but he's got ideas.
The poems of Enough now are available in the US in this Syzmborska collection: Map: Collected and Last Poems (Mariner Books, 2016).
One of the translation projects on which I worked with Doru Radu is work by Romanian philosopher and poet Ileana Mălăncioiu -- in particular My Sister Beyond, a collection written in response to the illness and death of her sister.
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