Translation of the Route

£12.99

May there be no ideas but in things

but I filled the things with ideas—

now they are so taut

they turn to dust

if I lightly touch them with a finger.

Translation of the Route is the eleventh collection by the award-winning Argentine poet and translator Laura Wittner. In poems that are precise, frank and finely tuned, Wittner explores the specificities of parental and familial love, life after marriage, and the re-ignition of the self in middle age.

The ‘things’ of life – bus journeys, potted plants, thunder at night, coffee-stained books, fleeting conversations and the rest – are made full through Wittner’s ability to pinpoint in them the consequential, and even the metaphysical, manipulating language with a translator’s delicate skill. There are funny, moving pen-portraits of Wittner’s two children, suddenly grown, as well as bell-clear descriptions of the task of writing. For this is also a collection about language itself – as an interface, as a surface, and as vital communication.

The poems in this edition, Wittner’s first collection available in English translation, have been translated by the Mexican-Scottish bilingual poet and translator Juana Adcock, acclaimed author of Manca and Split.

Co-published with Bloodaxe Books.

“Poems of the radiant everyday. In Juana Adcock’s warm translation, Laura Wittner’s chatty, witty voice comes through with gorgeous clarity. Reading this book is like listening to a wise, beloved friend over coffee.” – Clare Pollard

“Wittner’s poems in Adcock’s deft translation fold entire but only half-seen narratives into brief glimpses, like interior lives flashing past the window of a moving train. They are delivered with a misleading directness – a garrulous voice at your ear, its utterances appearing quotidian but imbued with the weird and cryptic. We sift for clues. How to decipher a particular coffee stain, the distant tinkle of broken glass, arcane road signs, a particular shade of fallen leaf, the shadows cast by dancing laundry? Wittner is alert to these strange messages, curious about them all, and willing to embrace the not-knowing. I could read these poems every day and still find the new in them.” – Martha Sprackland