Celan

by James Brasfield

There,
the whisper:

gradual breath
fattens

a word, bud
of stem form—

never before
this one,

the return of
the recognizable.

 

James Brasfield received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and his translation, with the author, of The Selected Poems of Olea Lysheha (Harvard Ukranian Research Institute Publications, 2000) received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. (2002)