When I caught up with Elena Knox—gosh! over a week ago—I was delighted to hear that her book looks like it’s also in the pipeline. She’s been on a train overnight from Chicago, and (from what I remember) had been working on edits during that trip, as well as, more generally, while she’s been in the States. Apparently an Australian editor had looked at her book, told her he liked it, thought it was great—couldn’t publish it. “It’ll sell 20 copies in Australia.” So, she’s been talking to an American publisher. Elena and I met several years ago at Varuna, the Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains (and, really, a little oasis) when we were there for a mentorship program during an absolutely delicious week of poetry. Our fellow-poets Ivy Alvarez and Kathryn Lomer have published their books already—Kathryn, precocious lady!, has published two volumes of poetry and a novel—so it’s nice that their stable buddies are slowly making good on the process too.
Is it cheating if, unable to find a poem from the Marshall Islands, I choose to use a myth instead? I’ve found a lovely one. But I’ve got over a month before my Independence Day hunt for poems from this particular nation of Oceania becomes pressing. In the mean time, I’m backing up the effort with the myth. I’m holding it in reserve.Spoke to a friend who is fluent in Portuguese—I’d like to work in partnership with someone to do some translating. I don’t feel that any of my languages are fully up to the task—I can muddle my way through reading most Romance languages these days, but wouldn’t trust myself on a translation, except for some simpler Italian pieces. So it was time to find a helping hand. Or tongue, so to speak. Now I have to find something untranslated that I think it would be good to work on. The next step. I don’t know exactly when this will happen, but speaking to a translator last weekend, he said all I can really do is dive in—you’re never really “ready” as such. When are we ready for anything?
