Gemma Gorga

Gemma Gorga (born in Barcelona in 1968) has published seven collections of poetry in Catalan. Her most recent collections are Mur (Barcelona: Meteora, 2015), which won the Premi de la Critica de Poesia Catalana, and Viatge al centre (Godall Edicions, 2020). Her other recent books include her essay on India, Indi Visible (Barcelona, 2018) and her book about reading and bookstores, Hi ha un país on la boira (Tushita Edicions, 2021), as well as translations from English to Catalan of the Indian poets Dilip Chitre, Kamala Das, and Arun Kolatkar, and a co-translation of selected poems by Edward Hirsch into Catalan. She is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Barcelona.

Voyage to the Center

Poems

By Gemma Gorga
Translated by Sharon Dolin

The poems in Voyage to the Center, by the contemporary Catalan poet Gemma Gorga and lucidly translated by the American poet Sharon Dolin, are extreme acts of compression, which explore the ways a poem may use very few words to convey meaning. Gorga understands both the power and the limits of language; these poems occupy the liminal space between speech and silence. In this her most minimalist style, Gorga’s spare, limpid poems rely on image and metaphor, and are often meditations on the process of poetic creation. They invite a reader to slow down and pay attention to the words that shimmer with presence as well as gesture toward the silence and white space of the page. Here, each word has a numinous existence, where even “the grass is on the verge of speaking.”