XVI

Haunting, in the words of Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck, ‘can be deferred, delayed, and disseminated, but with some crimes of humanity […] there is no putting to rest.’

XVII

A year after Xhevdet’s death, the publisher in Chapel Hill called me. She wanted me to come to Mexico City. I’m going to publish a posthumous collection, she said, but in order to do it I need the three of us to meet. The translator from Boston, the translator from Naarm, the publisher from Chapel Hill. I need our bodies and minds together in one room. Under Xhevdet’s roof. Will you come?

I was six months pregnant at the time. The ghost of my future son travelled with me, thirteen and a half thousand kilometres, to greet and remember and farewell our poet, to gather in his dark, poky study and read his unread work, to grieve with his widow and hear her stories spoken over the dinner table. One year had passed since his death, but she was still coming to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t be returning. Not in his previous form, at least.

XVIII

For to speak of the dead means to deny death and almost to defy it.

(Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History)

XIX

In Mexico City, we began the task of compiling Xhevdet’s unpublished and untranslated work and setting it into a new shape. A beautiful box worthy of his body of work. Our poet could not write anything new, but from his gifts we could still make something that had not existed before.

One night, during my stay, I had a vivid dream that Xhevdet was sitting beside me on the roof terrace of his home. He was smoking. Thank you for coming, he said. It’s good for my poems to have company. I think he said this in Spanish. It’s hard to recollect; by the time I tried to translate the dream into words, over breakfast, the image of Xhevdet with his cigarette was already disappearing through some other door.

XX

Suddenly the choice wasn’t so simple: either alive or not alive. It was […] as though there were some third possibility.

(Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t)

XXI

I want translation to be a doorway, an umbral / threshold to a haunted house (that is, to a poem haunted by every possible form of itself)

I want translation to kiss the veil that separates language from language / past from future / one world from another / life from death.

I want translation to be a Ouija board for poetry. To, as Sawako Nakayasu writes, ‘translate the spirit, the kinetics, the ghost that haunts it’

XXII

As we converged in Mexico City to gather up Xhevdet’s remaining poems, my poet felt realer to me than he ever had. After all, we had never met in person; just once via Zoom, and once in a dream. Now – there seemed no doubt about it – he was here with us. We were holding his words as if in our hands. Pocketing them. We were turning them over and re-speaking them, speaking them anew. And, holding them in this way, we could feel that they were still bleeding.