To mix together two adjectives:
Blend them by brush--
Cadmium yellow
with Prussian blue--
until you have achieved
their expressive tonality.
To compose the verdant
compose the verb.
Mesclar dos adjectius. Desfer-los amb el pinzell –
groc de cadmi amb blau de Prússia–
fins ajustar-ne la tonalitat expressiva.
Trobar el verd, trobar el verb.
Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968. She has a Ph.D. in Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature. She has published seven collections of poetry in Catalan. Her most recent collections are Mur (Barcelona, Meteora, 2015), which won the Premi de la Critica de Poesia Catalana, and Viatge al centre (Barcelona, Godall Edicions, 2020).
Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and Whirlwind (University of Pitts- burgh Press, 2012). The recipient of a 2021 NEA Fellowship in Translation and the winner of the inaugural Malinda A. Markham Memorial Prize in Translation, her translation of Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in the fall of 2021.