Stephen Kessler, Translator-Poet

Yesterday, I received my copy of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, in the mail ( ~ hooray for something interesting in the mailbox!) . I skimmed it this morning and discovered Stephen Kessler, translator of Desolation of the Chimera, the late poems of Luis Cernuda. I read these three stanzas from a poem in a review article by Edith Grossman and knew I wanted to share them:

Like a firebird
the moon perches in the branches
of the juniper.

The tree trunk is black,
the night air gray,
the moon gold.

This is God’s way of showing
that he’s heard tell of some
Japanese print.

Luis Cernuda
translated by Stephen Kessler