Sardine

Miriam Reyes (trans. Laura Cesarco Eglin)

Writing for the first time in Galician, Miriam Reyes crosses the oblique, multi-dimensional passages between Galicia and Venezuela, where she migrated at the age of eight. In Sardine, Reyes’ frustrations using her maternal grandfather’s native tongue become confrontations with the insufficiency of language itself, as a means to contain experience, meaning, and the self. Sardine lives in the ruptures in space and time forced open by migration and offers memory as a yoke for our discordant selves.

'In Sardine, Miriam Reyes has written a beautiful poem from a space beyond 'the fiction / the frustration / of the bilingual dictionary,' finding poetry in the complex and noisy space where languages—and poets—meet. The poem is shaped both by the 'difficulty' and the 'pleasure' of this noisy meeting place. This is a poem that hedges, hypothesizes, crosses out, footnotes, and relentlessly reworks its own language and logic. The difficulty is the pleasure in other words. Big thanks to Laura Cesarco Eglin for translating a superb, original, contemporary work of poetry with such cunning and skill.' – Johannes Göransson