Reckoning by Suzanne Jill Levine

As Ezra Pound demonstrated, the distinction between translation and original isn’t absolute, since poetry is always a dialogue between individuals and languages. In this new book Levine, our best translator from Spanish, creates the space for such a conversation by placing her own poems adjacent to her translations of poets she has known and worked with over a thirty year span. In Reckoning, a clear-eyed girl grows up to be an accomplished writer, to know that growing up means everything is always going away. At the same time, because of poetry, “cemeteries don’t always have to be sad” but there can never be enough affection. Ultimately this book offers us “the laugh of a translator in love with the sea”, for whom language too offers the oceanic feeling.
~Leonard Schwartz, author of At Element

This chapbook is marvelous: I cannot differentiate between the original poems and the translations–they are very unusual. A persona develops among the personae. I like the missing of desire and the cut hair, too… and the sense that words are inadequate, until they burst open. And they last. The book is a mosaic. Foreign like new things are, with primary intensity. The pieces balance like the parts of a huge brightly-colored mobile.
~Robyn Bell, author of Small Potatoes

This is the book of the girl, translated and translating. Levine shifts from remembering to divining words as imperceptibly as sky meets sea in a distant horizon. A “dark learned speech” enters into the flesh of the here and now in a lithesome, lightsome rendering. The mother’s “bathing suit” is “ample” and the girl springs free of “the poets whose songs to her mean nothing.”

~Jeanne Heuving, author of Incapacity

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]