“O let me say in silence that I love you,
and prove to you in silence that I love you.”
The introduction starts out highlighting some of the difficulties of translating Gorter, for example, his penchant for making changes to a lot of words in his own language which are hard to carry over into English.
While the longer ones were beyond me most of the time (I couldn’t get into them), the translator Haft was able to capture the beauty of Gorter in the smaller ones perfectly,
"Like the glance
of a star
on a lake:
her dance."
You can't conjure up an image more beautiful than that.
"After the day that never answers hunger
luckily there's night, the haven.
True, no better does night bring
the emptiness-abating thing
but since I'm one with night's cool,
because she's empty I forget
that I am too."
Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this!