Clothes for My Pain
The cold night has a beast’s hunger
You are distant
resting there on the bed of the Great Dream
solitude goes quietly through your veins
and you breathe yearning like air
I
with slender threads of night
stitch thoughts
into clothes for my pain
You and I, father
we measure ourselves with death
you and I…
Outside someone is crying out
outside someone is crying
Great God
they’re killing us again
Ropa para el dolor
La noche fría tiene hambre de bestia
Estás lejos
acostado en el lecho del Gran Sueño
la soledad va con calma en tus venas
respiras el anhelo como si fuese aire
Yo
con hilos delgados de la noche
tejo pensamientos
hago ropa para el dolor
Papá
tú y yo nos medimos con la muerte
tú y yo…
Alguien grita afuera
alguien llora afuera
Gran Dios
otra vez nos están matando
Alice Whitemore is a writer, editor and literary translator living on Eastern Maar country. She is the translations editor at Cordite Poetry Review and an associate editor at Giramondo. Her translation work from Spanish and Italian includes novels by Mariana Dimópulos (Argentina), Guillermo Fadanelli (Mexico) and Jonathan Bazzi (Italy), and poetry collections by Xhevdet Bajraj (Kosovo/Mexico) and Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (Mexico/Peru). Her translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Australian Book Review, The Sydney Review of Books, Overland, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper and The Conversation, among others. She has coordinated and chaired a number of events at Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, including 2019’s The Art of Translation panel and 2018’s Collaborative Translation and Poetry Workshop. She was a founding member of community arts organisation TransCollaborate: Collaborative Translation for Inclusion, and serves on the committee of the Australian Association for Literary Translation. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Monash University. Her translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.
Xhevdet Bajraj is an ethnic Albanian Kosovar poet, dramatist and translator living in Mexico. He was deported from Kosovo in 1999, and through the International Parliament of Writers he was granted asylum at the Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl in Mexico City. Bajraj has published over fifteen volumes of poetry, in both Albanian and Spanish, and his work has been translated into nine languages. He is a two-time winner of the Kosovo Writers’ Society’s award for best book of poetry (1993 and 2000) and has also been awarded the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry (2004) and the Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian (2010). The poems translated here were first published in the anthologies Copa ime e qiellit / Mi cachito de cielo [My Own Shred of Sky] (2015) and Cuatro patrias [Rosewater] (2017). The translations were first published in the chapbook We Fall Like Children (Egret, 2018).
