University of Pittsburgh Press
Voyage to the Center
Paperback $20.00

Request Exam or Desk Copy. Request Review Copy

Voyage to the Center

Poems

By Gemma Gorga
Translated by Sharon Dolin
So much attention, so much bright intensity, is concentrated into Gemma Gorga’s incandescent poems. It’s no wonder she asks her muse for a breather—‘From time to time, / please / don’t show up . . . // allow me to unword / body and abode.’ Like uranium or pure gold, or even better, tiny black holes, these minimalist poems are marked with a profound density. This work is careful and precise, yet wildly democratic—all orders of beings are welcome here, from houseflies to angels, from perverse genii to radioactive submarines, to spoons, to grains of sand, and to the silences they inhabit. Thanks to Sharon Dolin for these remarkable translations that capture both the beauty of these poems and their philosophic weight.
Elaine Equi, author of Out of the Blank and The Intangibles
Paperback $20.00

Request Exam or Desk Copy. Request Review Copy

A Dual-language Collection of Minimalist Poems that Shimmer with Presence

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.”

More Praise

Praise for Late to the House of Words,translated by Sharon Dolin:
“Gemma Gorga is a poet of luminous imagination. Lush, yet focused and urgent, she delivers a book of unerring everyday astonishments. Virtuously compact, these poems are anything but small. Each one transforms into a vision of playfulness, heartbreak, and beauty. With the help of Sharon Dolin’s remarkable translation, we are lucky to enter the house Gemma Gorga has built out of ardor and astonishment.”

Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected

These poems transform the objects and experiences of quotidian encounters into luminous moments of wonder. Sharon Dolin’s superb translation from Catalan reveals the power of this historically suppressed language, in the hands of a masterful poet, to offer new ways to understand the world.

Judges’ Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize, 2022 Shortlist

6 x 9 in.

March, 2027

isbn : 9780822968733

Series

Subjects

about the authors

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.

learn more
Gemma Gorga
Sharon Dolin

Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Manual for Living (Pittsburgh, 2016). Her fourth book Burn and Dodge (Pittsburgh, 2008) won the 2007 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of a prose memoir Hitchcock Blonde (Terra Nova Press, 2020) and two previous books of translation from Catalan: Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (Field Translation Series/Oberlin College Press, 2019), which received grants from PEN and Institut Ramon Llull, and Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga (Saturnalia Books, 2021), winner of Saturnalia Books inaugural Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, a Finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, AWP Donald Hall Prize, Pushcart Prize, and Witter Bynner Fellowship, Dolin is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and teaches poetry workshops in New York City.

learn more
Sharon Dolin