Cover Photo: This photograph shows a person in a dress standing on top of a grassy hill, the sky behind them a bright blue. They are holding an old, worn traveling case in one hand.
Photograph by Lurii Melentsov/Unsplash

Translated Self

Portuguese was my first language, but it was quickly followed by English. To this day, I have the impression that when I speak in English, I bury bits of myself in the process.

Piauí

says

Translation is much more of a gain than a loss

Beyond the Mother Tongue once said

Memory Speaks

writes

she says

In Other Words

language attrition

has compareddeparture destination

in another language would be another poem

that tells the right time of some other place

a language just to speak with another child

reconstructed on a beach corroded bit by bit by the sea

at some determined point the poems become a pair

of old schoolbooks

Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer and literary translator based in Los Angeles. She is the deputy editor of Image magazine at the Los Angeles Times, and was formerly a senior editor at Hyperallergic. She is the translator of This House by Ana Martins Marques (Scrambler Books) and the editor of Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction (Rizzoli). You can follow her at @ewoukalmino.