Spring 2026
Volume 20 #2
As Ezra celebrates its twentieth year in publication with this issue, we pause to express gratitude to our readers and contributors, and to reflect on the vital, dynamic work we do together.
The expression “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man,” attributed to the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–475 BCE), is perhaps a perfect metaphor for the act of close reading that is translation. Goethe’s “Dauer im Wechsel” (Constancy in Change – 1803) echoes similar notions of perpetual cycles of transformation. These cycles govern not merely the seasons and tides, but also the work that translators do with every word choice, every edit, every redraft of their translations of original literature. They likewise describe the effect translation has upon readers, who, presented with a text transposed into their own language, are themselves forever changed – transformed – in their reading of it. Translator and Poet Laureate Arthur Sze puts it simply: “Because language is always evolving, speech, patterns, syntax, and vocabulary always shifting, translations are by nature ephemeral.” (New York Times interview, April 19, 2026). As spring begins to break open the soil beneath our feet, we at Ezra are pleased to provide a fresh look at the protean power of perennial impermanence as it shapes and re-shapes not merely the physical world, but the very process of renewal that characterizes the work of translators.
In this, our twentieth anniversary issue, Ezra is thrilled to present works that bear witness to the paradox of the constancy of change in the continuous patterns of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Our featured writer, Chris Holdaway, begins the exploration with an exquisite translation of works by Miguel Otero Silva. His poems evoke the solidity of the “living mountain”, the flow of water, and the evanescent beauty of the lilies and gladioli, as the poet – and nature itself – mourn the loss of a dear friend. Particularly striking is the tone of the poem: it is both a remembrance of one who has passed, and an homage to the strength and resilience of nature as a creative, continually life-giving force. In one passage, for example, Holdaway leaves the word “frailejones” (in English, Paramo Sunflowers) untranslated in the work; a splendid choice that bathes the reader in the music of the original Spanish. A flower uniquely adapted to the high altitudes of the Andes, the frailejón acts as a kind of water tower for all the life surrounding it. As the Paramo Sunflower plays an essential role in its Andean ecosystem, so poetry in translation remains indispensable to sustaining cross-cultural connection, which in turn nourishes our collective sense of humanity.
In Tatyana Bek’s The Letter, translated by Bita Takrimi, the poet brings readers to a focal point further along the continuum of birth, life, death, and renewal, toward decomposition – the undoing of meaning. She tells us her words are “scattered … across the page / like snow dusting the earth / like rain spreading across the stage”, fearing that her “twelve short lines” might never be read, or worse, left behind like scraps for the rag pickers – the decomposers of the human cultural world, who gather all that is unwanted or forgotten. The poet rages against that inevitability, and in a state comparable to the anger often associated with grief, Bek goes so far as to insult her own poetry, calling it “a mama’ s girl” – weak, simpering, ineffective; left behind to disintegrate while the universe moves forward. She thus confronts her work with an implicit accusation of irrelevance: “Where’s your sense of risk? Where’s your nightingale’s spree?”
Even as we acknowledge the cycle of ceaseless impermanence that governs our world, the question remains: what good does poetry do us? We return to Arthur Sze to frame a response: “Poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully.” (NYT Interview, April 19, 2026). In a world where AI has already heightened humans’ sense of alienation from work, from cultural production, from creative engagement, and from one another, no vehicle is more powerful than one that can imbue life with meaning, or that can bridge divides among us. Translation of poetry, indeed of all literature, is a creative act of reading that brings people together from across the globe. It is a unifying force that bridges worlds. In that sense, translation is agentic. In an era where disunity is rife, translation becomes the mechanism through which disparate cultures and languages – individuals from all over – can meet and not merely reach understanding, but engage in a shared experience of meaning-creation. Nothing is more human, more powerful, or more transcendent.
FEATURED WRITER : Chris Holdaway
Chris Holdaway is a poet, publisher, and translator from Aotearoa, New Zealand. He is the author of Gorse Poems (Titus Books, 2022), directs Compound Press, and translates poetry into English from French, German, and Spanish. Below are Holdaway’s translations of two poems by Venezuelan poet and political figure, Miguel Otero Silva.
THE CHOIR’S THIRD VOICE IS THAT OF THE ISLAND:
“I sowed the bright stars
that in his heart had lain
and it was as good as the day
of the freeing of prisoners.”
A.E.B.
Light that browned his face
was the fire of my beaches;
the flesh of my dragon fruits
cut his very first tooth.
I expelled the hot breeze
of his maritime verses;
juice of my date palms
sweetened his alphabet
and into his agrarian heart
I sowed the bright stars.
I gave him helm and authority
in my resounding coasts;
I taught him to plant roses
and contraband lights.
Navigating in my waters
the sails unfurled his joy
and it was my dark embers,
the warmth of my burrow,
the candle of tenderness
that in his heart had lain.
To the choir trembling
in tears over his death I come
with the water I don’t have,
with my most precious pearls.
He was like a valley aflame
that blossomed without rain;
he was like the untamed sea
with a star in its depths;
just as the night was deep
and it was as good as the day.
I curse the fury of the waters,
I curse the vigorous squalls,
I curse the harsh rocks
that wrecked his canoe.
I who was quarry and forge
for his inaugural verses
cry flowers of lemon trees,
cry the tears of bells for those
who saw not the morning
of the freeing of prisoners.
MIGUEL OTERO SILVA
THE CHOIR’S FOURTH VOICE IS THAT OF THE MOUNTAIN:
“He has died”, the people say, and I mourn him with the simple waters that dampen the mosses of my tundra.
I mourn him with the fog that is a handkerchief to my paths and my ravines,
with the white anguish of my adobe villages, of my whitewashed churches,
with the white prayers of my sheep that lean out over the passes to hear his death knell.
“He has died”, the people say, and I mourn him with silence, with the seasoned and unspoken voice of the mountains.
This silence that flows slowly from the quiet thickets of the clouds,
this peace that lies down to sleep on my inclines like a river held up by the fingers of the air,
this infinite and agonizing secret wants to say, does not say, contemplates and mourns his death beneath the purest blue.
“He has died”, the people say, and I mourn him with the pain of the winds, with the coarse throat of the winds.
The wind whose music shakes my grains and fans my seeds into the abyss,
the wind whose hooves tear up my thousand-year-old flanks like those of a young foal,
the wind is neither music nor hoof, neither dancer nor blade, but a dove wounded by his death.
“He has died”, the people say, and I mourn him with the gladioli of my valleys and with the frailejones of my peaks.
From the lily, little hatchling of the fields that scurries about on my foothills,
to the bold lichen that sinks its dark tongue into my highest snows,
all flowers and branches, all sap is weeping, just as my green heart is a tree felled by his death.
“He has died”, the people say, and I mourn him with the stern and pensive appearance of my men of coarse cloth.
The women who climb my footpaths, hiding the frost of their tears beneath the hats of men,
and the children of apples and nostalgia that emerge shivering from the fog like cold angels,
the vigilant faces, suspicious eyes, for whose embers I am a living mountain and no tomb of stone and scrub,
men, women, children, illuminate their wheaten loneliness with the light of his death.
“He has died”, the people say, and I mourn him.
MIGUEL OTERO SILVA
traduttori/traduttrici
Terese Coe ( Jorge Luis Borges )
Bita Takrimi ( Tatyana Bek )
James Richie ( Ernesto López Parra )
Daniel Picker ( Pablo Neruda )
Huwaida Issa ( Noufal Nayouf )
Chanchala Srivastava ( Sarveshwar Saxena )
Translated by Terese Coe
You are invulnerable. Haven’t they given you,
the muses that rule your fate, the certitude
of dust? Isn’t your irreversible time that of
the river in whose mirror Heraclitus
glimpsed the symbol of his impermanence?
Waiting for you is the marble you will not read.
On it already written are the date,
the city, and the epitaph. The others too
are dreams of time, not solid bronze
nor indefectible gold; the universe,
like you, is Proteus. Shade, you will go
to the shade that lies in wait, deadly inside
the compass of your movement. Understand:
in some way you’re already dead.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Translated by Bita Takrimi
There’s no hiding from these thoughts.
I sit, I lie down, face first on the bed.
I know: you’ll never respond
to this letter that says nothing, unread.
But I didn’t exactly write it;
I scattered words across the page,
like snow dusting the earth,
like rain spreading over the stage.
So in its plain gray envelope,
this letter of twelve short lines
will shiver and sing like the wind,
drenched down to its very spine.
A sharp snowflake caught in its light,
a blizzard to cover your desk in white…
How did it turn out, I wonder—
and how will it look in your sight?
Down the wide asphalt streets
the old rag collectors roam,
those who want all the unwanted,
the worn-out, the torn, the threadbare, the thrown-away.
People walk by, each with their own cares,
but these old souls have just one goal—
to search for what’s forgotten, shattered,
forever lost, an odd devotion.
I seek the new, the undiscovered.
They search for the tattered, the discarded.
I don’t know how I feel about them:
to be surprised, to scorn, or fear them?
People walk by, each with their wealth—
but theirs is scraps, rust, rags, and dust,
this strange treasure they seem to trust.
Sometimes I see them on the street—
their backs bent over, so frail, so worn,
their bony hands, their weary voices…
And I shudder, wondering who they are:
greedy for the humblest scraps,
loving what no one else would love,
remembering what I have long forgotten?
TATYANA BEK
Translated by Bita Takrimi
I step up and ask him,
“Grinder,
sharpen my knives, my scissors, please,
make them sharper, cleaner, finer,
make them useful once again to me.”
The rough wheel spins and whirs,
sparks whistle and brightly leap,
as the rusted, worn, and dulled away
falls from the grinder’s wheel in heaps.
The storm of yellow-blue sparks dies down,
and the blade gleams, lively once more.
…And oh, a sharp envy grinds in me—
I keep watching the grinder, wishing for more.
If only I could call out to the crowd,
“Bring me your burdens! Let me be
of use to you, like that old grinder,
stripping away what’s not meant to be!”
You silly little thing,
my poetry!
Where’s your sense of risk,
where’s your nightingale’s spree?
You sing like a little finch,
from the voice of a crowd,
of smoke-soaked boys
who run off mushroom-bound,
with baskets full of chanterelles,
earth clinging to the roots,
and summer trains rumbling
Golitsyno to Fili route.
But here’s the truth, no lie—
you’re a mama’s girl,
my poetry, my shy.
…While somewhere, somewhere far away,
the trains roar on their track,
and the stars blaze huge and bright,
charged by that distant thunderclap!
TATYANA BEK
Translated by James Richie
You too, in exile –Oh! Inaccessible blue–
cloud –like my reality–
kissing
my wound’s chrysanthemums
Peace on the dew-covered rose –Love
undone
And the weeping here among new flourishings
of this spring, not mine
the afternoon in your hands
in my seas
Who would nail up the crosses of clarity
in the torrent’s fallen harmony
Taper to the edge of my weeping
like that broken cloud–
the weather vane’s swallow
Affix –soft and steadfast– your dream
to my new path.
–Let others follow in the ways of men–
Make my path of daydreams your own.
ERNESTO LOPEZ PARRA
Translated by James Richie
Time is not forever
every summer
is another winter.
Every new word
is even quieter.
Longer and sadder
each road is newer.
More pain with every love, every dream
more impossible.
Your absence grows old. Every day,
you and I are further apart.
Tomorrow is yesterday. On today’s
path, time is wasted.
Afterwards, no one will know what it’s like
to kiss the pure roots of your memory!
ERNESTO LOPEZ PARRA
Translated by Daniel Picker
Girl dark haired and agile, the sun ripens the fruit,
grows the wheat tall, waves the umber kelp,
fills your shape with life, your eyes luminous glow,
and gives your mouth the smile of water.
A sun dark and anxious, warms your strands of hair,
braids your dark locks when you reach out your arms,
as you play in the warm light as a girl by the stream,
that gives your clear eyes the tidepool’s gleam.
Dark-haired girl, agile, lean, you look away, lost deep
in soul. I feel cast out, forlorn, far off from your life:
a bee I fear as the power of the ocean wave’s strong tide
pulls, as the sun grows the grain beyond the shore rocks.
My lost soul looks for you, your youthful life,
I loved to behold full, warm, ripe like fruit from sun
above the golden fields not far flung from the cliff
rocks above the sea’s crushing waves by kelp-strewn beach.
Your voice with sweet birdsong above the garden free,
your thin figure bending to delicate butterflies fluttering
beside the fields, golden with a few poppies near curving
road, dark in shadows, past the winding, old live oaks.
PABLO NERUDA
Translated by Huwaida Issa
From the morning, the sun spills across the sky;
From the trees, the fragrance of shade.
From the reeds, the wistful flute.
From a plucked promise on your parting path,
the milky sap of Jasmine flows.
The boy comes with his ball, alone.
Golden pine needles and white Sesbania.
But nobody’s there!
Just a grim, mourning green park
The boy walks away.
His shoulders arched into a bow.
The disappointment wakes the girl from her sleep.
A cross casts its shadow on the ground
She hugs her small, panting dog
Freckles bloom on her nose and cheeks
Light strides naked through the tears
The field is empty,
as are the shades and the benches.
The park is empty,
as are the mornings and the lovers’ rendezvous.
From the sting of disappointment on your parting path,
the milky sap of jasmine flows
NOUFAL NAYOUF
Translated by Chanchala Srivastava
Till the far end, the hills were asleep.
Suddenly, the dunes began to toss and turn.
as if they had begun to sleepwalk.
An unseen mighty hand—
rose as clouds
started squeezing the stones.
A fountain cascaded.
Then everything turned into a desert.
From the quiet earth,
sky-high twisters arose—
turning into a colorful display,
then raining down
to calm the dust.
Suddenly, the bamboo forest caught fire.
Golden flames flared upward,
then slowly, slowly turning green,
they embraced the leaves.
The whole forest sang in a million flutes.
Leaves danced and left the trees,
flying away — becoming green parrots.
Somewhere deep inside me,
a swamp deer caught in branches
floundered in irritation.
The entire forest shook.
Now he is free — leaping, he disappears
into the vacuum
that stretches
from the artery
to infinity.
SARVESHWAR SAXENA
Crimson Palms
Translated by Chanchala Srivastava
The first time I saw
a bee turning into a lotus,
then a lotus into blue water —
blue water into several white birds.
I saw the white birds become
a crimson sky,
and the sky morph into your palm.
And so, with closed eyes,
I saw my tears
turn into dreams —
for the first time.
SARVESHWAR SAXENA
REVIEWS:
SMOKE by Gabriela Alemán. Translated by Dick Cluster. City Lights Books San Francisco, 2025, pp 168
Brazilian-born Ecuadorian, Gabriela Alemán has a remarkable publication record from short stories to novels to articles to critical essays on literature and film. Her latest novel, Smoke, is her third work in English translation, alongside her previous novel, Poso Wells (2018) and her short story collection, Family Album (2022), both published with City Lights.
Translator Dick Cluster worked on all three translations, though he co-translated Family Album with Mary Ellen Fieweger. As usual, such collaboration added to the success of this latest work, ensuring the unique voice, rhythm, and cadence of the original work. In an interview with Gabriela Alemán, on the occasion of translating her novel, Poso Wells, Dick Cluster shares how he read it from cover to cover on a flight from Cuba to the US. He describes it as having “the page-turner qualities, the moral compass, the play with language, the mash-up of realism with the supernatural, of humor and optimism with despair.” Such generous qualities are not only reflected in Alemán’s debut in English, but also pertain to her latest work, Smoke.
A finalist for the Cercador Prize, Smoke is set in Paraguay, echoing the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. The main character, an aging woman named Gabriela, returns to Asunción in 1989 after having been abroad for two decades. Andrei, the man who raised her, has left her his journal with his youngest son, Pablo. From its pages, she finds out how Andrei left Palermo after his mother’s death, sailing for Buenos Aires, where he befriended bacteriologist Palamazczuk and inventor Biró. From setting up a leper colony with Palamazczuk to hunting for ñandúes to treating soldiers on a hospital ship to finding a way through the lush jungle to deliver a letter to Caporal Ayala, Andrei witnesses the Chaco war between Paraguay and Bolivia and its devastating repercussions on the land and the Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani people.
Gabriela’s story weaves together with the elusive pages of Andrei’s journal. The dual-timeline narratives connect the historical events of Andrei’s time to Gabriela’s present, at times blurring the lines: “Nothing here escapes the past, a flood of molasses spreading implacably over it all” (35). Memory and history permeate the present, accounting for how Andrei’s life has shaped the existence of all the people around him: his two sons, Francesco, Carlos Alberto Ayala, his two friends, and even that of the dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. Alemán traces the destiny of Andrei with a fine brush from curious boy to restless young man to overprotective father.
The writer uses various techniques to illustrate how the past shapes reality: alternating “now” and “then” sections, incorporating letters between Andrei and his two friends, poetry excerpts, real-life figures like inventor Ladislao Biró and future dictator Alfredo Stroessner, Gabriela’s reflections on the past events, and the mystery of her appearance in Andrei’s life. Andrei acts at times as a beacon of light, revealing the beautiful yet relentless force of nature, the brutality of war and disease; the way desire consumes and elevates. His trajectory across seas and lands, either softly touches or shatters the other characters’ lives; at times, Andrei takes the blame for his choices like when he confesses to Palamazczuk that he had to give up his firstborn, Nacho to Stroessner: “He came one day and saw Nacho playing among the trees and said he wanted to be his godfather, because the country needed strong, healthy boys who would grow up to make the Colorados great. He took him. When he brought him back, he was a changed boy.” Out of fear and wishing to protect his family, he agrees to pay the price of estrangement.
Dick Cluster beautifully recreates in English the rich layers of the original narrative, the interesting mashup of poetry and fiction, the uniqueness of the Guarani language and culture. The intersections of storyline with poetic sections and the way the English translation is peppered with Spanish or Guarani words give the reading a unique flavor. This fusion of genres and geographies, a unique feature of Alemán’s writing, is once again brilliantly carried across languages, captivating the reader with its richness. Alemán’s talent at telling stories, her lightness of phrasing and good sense of pacing are embedded in the English translation, with Cluster fiercely fusing the lavish descriptions with the dramatic war scenes and the everyday conversations.
~~Clara Burghelea
BODIES FOUND IN VARIOUS PLACES: THE SELECTED POEMS OF ELVIRA HERNANDEZ. Translated by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher. Cardboard House Press, 2025, pp. 320
This is an anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry written between 1981 and 2018, which the translators, Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher, describe as “a survey of her poetic oeuvre,” intended to convince readers that she is one of the most important contemporary Latin American poets.
Elvira Hernández is actually the pseudonym of Rosa María Teresa Adriasola Olave, a reputable Chilean poet, essayist, and literary critic. She published several collections of poetry and essays: ¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (Giddy up, Halley!) (1986), La bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag) (1991), Santiago Waria (1992), and Pájaros desde mi ventana (Birds from My Window) (2018). She received several important literary awards: the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Award (Chile 2024).
During the Pinochet police state, she was arrested and tortured by the secret police for five days. Upon her release, she wrote her first work, The Chilean Flag. This experience shaped the rest of her work, at least thematically as she became interested in documenting historical memory and the limitations of language under dictatorship. Her poetry is not necessarily intimate but rather voices the collective needs of her people and the urgency of poverty, hunger, oppression, or violence. At the same time, Hernández has a fine eye for weaving together the personal and the political with a voice that is equally delicate and strong.
All these preoccupations are mirrored in the six parts of the collection, efficiently summarized in the generous introduction offered by the two translators. Their intention is to equally draw an inviting picture of the poetry and personality of Elvira Hernández — “to offer a panorama of Hernández’s oeuvre” — and rightfully position her alongside her peers, Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, in the Chilean poetic pantheon. It would have been similarly important for the translators to address the challenges raised by the process of carrying across her unique style and voluntary voice from Spanish into English.
Perhaps their intention was rather to give Elvira Hernández’s words the right to speak for themselves, revealing how, for instance, the world’s horrors enhance her personal distress. No other poem captures this better than “The Chilean Flag,” both a banner and a woman:
The Chilean Flag says nothing about herself
` she reads herself in her mirror small and round
glinting delayed in time like an echo
there is much broken glass
shattered like the lines of an open hand
read
in search of stones for her desires
Her flag is a cloth treated in the same demeaning way women are, not only in Chile but around the world.
The Chilean Flag is hung between two buildings
her fabric swells like an ulcerated belly—falls like
an old tit—
like a circus tent
with her legs in the air she has a slit in the middle
a little coochie for the air
a little hole for the ashes of General O’Higgins
an eye for the Avenida General Bulnes
The Chilean Flag is off to the side
forgotten
Much like a woman, the flag has been performative and disposable, invisible and ready to be paraded. It all comes to the power of the pair of hands holding and marshaling this flag.
One thing that immediately catches the reader’s eye about the collection is Elvira Hernández’s expressive stance. The poet pays close attention to the potential of form and how it can be molded and flexed to convey the strong content. For instance, strong emotion is distilled in the visual details of the first poem of “Bodies Found in Various Places”:
- someone without pain said it was a hollow-eyed pumice stone
sleepless many years
a sponge on fetid earth of Judas kisses
craters one and another craters cranium in short
where there was light and voice for its own lacrimal font there was none
the ants entered with their juices
flies emerged without their eggs
the children cheered on the waste creator of life
and once again without meaning to, something larvated in Juan’s head
in the garbage dump of Buin
Elvira Hernández fiercely documents the atrocities of the Pinochet regime and acts as a bullhorn for the maimed, the missing, the discarded. Her unnerving imagery equally haunts and seduces.
The rest of the collection is interspersed with more visual elements and intriguing language choices, aimed at enhancing the emotional resonance of her writing and engaging tone. The presence of the Spanish original poems deepens the reading experience and reveals Elvira Hernández’s distinctive voice in a successful blending of tone and cadence that echoes the shared human experience.
~~Clara Burghelea