“My first reading of this remarkable translation left me stunned, uneasy in the best way–not with the poems but with myself, ‘inexplicable and continuing.’ The second gave me the sense that my encounters within the poems had physically changed me, making my face, too, ‘apricot,’ my skeleton ‘luminous.’

Touched with extravagance and also restraint; unwilling to choose or let well enough alone, especially not the feminine; inhabited by cardinals and jellyfish, octopuses and firebirds and stones that become ‘fruit of water,’ flowers real and painted, birds and nights that sing, A Sea at Dawn places human experience alongside the experience of ‘the poor sleepy scarecrow,’ reshaping language itself to effect its transformations.

Reading these poems in English, I think they must be untranslatable–yet here they are, a great gift bestowed on English readers by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas. To do the work, Kercheval, Pitas, and their editors have invented an idiom all their own, to meet the idiom that belongs entirely to Guerra. In doing so, they have created a great gift for Anglophone readers.”

“‘Translation is an experience of encounter,’ as Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas write in their afterword to this luminous, often surprising translation from Silvia Guerra’s complex body of poetry. Their work—like and with Guerra’s—enacts encounters not only between languages, but between sounds and subjectivities, human and nonhuman collaborators, the many meanings contained in a single word. To read Guerra’s poetry is to dive into a shared interiority. We are lucky to have this translation that enfolds us, in the words of one of the poems, into ‘[t]he very center of things.’”

“The poems in A Sea at Dawn, in both the original Spanish and Pitas and Kercheval’s illuminating translation, are a profound gift for English language readers’ first encounter with Silvia Guerra’s poetry. This collection introduces the vast poetic scope, the fascinating musicality, and the often beautifully incomprehensible syntax of one of Uruguay’s significant contemporary poets. My gratitude to Pitas and Kercheval for not only providing us this generous sample of Guerra’s oeuvre but also for their insightful Afterword—read it first!—which provides an important cipher for understanding Guerra’s poetics and their translation practice, ultimately bringing us closer to an experience of ‘the final edge of those chambers/ a reverberation…the speech of a secret world.’”