on Jeanette L. Clariond's Even Time Bleeds
Calibration

‘So my body sinks into the water’ opens ‘Post Canto’, the first poem in Even Time Bleeds. Already, in this first descent, we encounter one of the volume’s central tensions: how to translate, and curate, a voice that is singular yet elusive, austere yet prone to rhetorical excess. In Spanish, the line reads simply, ‘Mi cuerpo cae en el agua’, followed by a similarly spare sentence: ‘Mi cuerpo ha sido violado / mis restos arrojados a la ciénaga’. The translator Forrest Gander renders this as ‘My body raped, its limbs lopped / slopped into a swamp’, an inventive leap that intensifies sound and violence. Throughout the book, such moments invite the reader into a double reading: Clariond’s poetry as written and as reimagined through translation.

This back-and-forth can be illuminating. Gander is often at his best when he risks sonic extravagance to approximate Clariond’s corporeal urgency. Yet the accumulation of additions and tonal shifts can obscure the severity that gives her work its force. Clariond’s Spanish often operates through restraint; when English embellishment overpowers that restraint, the poems can feel overwritten. The problem is not ambition but calibration.

Questions of selection further complicate the reading experience. The anthology draws from multiple phases of Clariond’s career, including poems from Amonites, a sequence of one-sentence meditations influenced by palaeontology and archaeology. While these fragments contain flashes of insight in Spanish, their aphoristic quality often veers towards repetition, and in English, they occasionally flatten into banality. One unfortunate example reads, ‘Out of empathy, placing the pot in a more scenic ...