One Impossible Step

What a blessing to have Orides Fontela in English! Her poems make words touch their edges; at these edges, words touch the reader’s skin, as heart-being and skein of thought. Our humanity emerges in her poems not from personal reference, but from verbal indices as compressed and vital as air: we breathe. Her poems listen intensely to silence as form and forms as silence. Fontela writes the impossible that exists and is all that exists. Chris Daniels’ translations make it so.

Seeking always a form or finality “beyond life,” Orides Fontela wrestles with poetic inquiry where inquiry itself alters—transposes—its subject. Chris Daniels adeptly responds to the challenge of translating Fontela, offering formal shaping that embraces Fontela’s eccentricities while always remaining sensitive to the alternately knotty and limpid urgencies of her poems. In their determined plumbing of meaning, this poetry refines and redefines a dynamic reality. Fontela resolutely ventures toward “the real” at any cost, no matter how difficult.