from "The Sister's Apology"

by Mary Winegarden

The book you want

                  our lost book, I can’t find it

                  is no doubt somewhere     in the house

                  scraps from the first chapter
                  of your novel—a thin trail of breadcrumbs
                  leading to a forest of empty pages—

                  our conversation can begin there
                  (I’ll happily invent)

                               the only happiness Tolstoy allows
                               in a fallen world

                  

                   unless you come out from behind    
                   the trees of the dead


                               that sad pair of shadows      the company I keep


                    you see how I read and re-read, scrutinizing
                    your words, those pages
                    you’ve left me—dressed up
                    now in italics
       

                                try to make sense of this story

Mary Winegarden grew up outside Washington, D.C. After graduating from the University of Chicago, she worked for several years in community arts in London, and then moved to San Francisco, where she earned her M.A. in Comparative Literature. Mary Winegarden’s translations of Russian poets have been published in Magazine and in Crossing Centuries: An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Poetry (Talisman House). Her poems have appeared in the journal 26. She teaches English at San Francisco State University, and is working on a new collection of poetry, Chiasmus. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, actor Geoff Hoyle.

Her sister, Katharine Washburn, was a critic, editor and translator of poetry from classical and modern European languages. She co-edited World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time as well as Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture and Tongues of Angels, Tongues of Men: A Book of
Sermons. She was also the acclaimed co-translator of Paul Celan: Last Poems. Ms. Washburn was on the editorial staff of the Book-of-the-Month Club. She had been working on her first novel, The Translator’s Apology, when she died in March, 2000.

Mary Winegarden (San Francisco, CA)
The Translator's Sister

Poetry. Paper, perfect bound, 81 pp.
$14.95 plus s&h
2011, ISBN 978-1936419-029


In response to the unexpected death of her sister Katharine Washburn, Mary Winegarden has taken on the challenge of translating their lives into living language. Using phrases from Washburn’s work as her foil, Winegarden creates a moving meditation on the bonds of sisterhood. Crossing boundaries between prose and poetry, fiction and memoir, convention and experimentation, The Translator’s Sister  resonates with the intimacy and humor of remembered details, with loss translated into art. This shimmering conversation will sweep you in.

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