THIS COULD TAKE SOME TIME

By Clara Muschietti

Eulalia Books, 2022

The unrestrained and skeptical voice of award-winning Argentine poet Clara Muschietti, here available for the first time in English translation by Curtis Bauer, PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grantee and winner of International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation, embodies an ideal that demands elegance in suffering and grace under pressure as her intense observation finds poetry that enters the heart of the world, with all its cruelty and all its tenderness.

Photographer and poet Clara Muschietti's one-of-a-kind poems live in the space between the outer world and the inner world, and translator Curtis Bauer expertly and beautifully brings us into that vibrating space--navigating between buildings, bodies, and breath, along with what we thought would be and what we see in front of us. "Right now/ I find it impossible to believe/ all the information/ I was given about the world," Muschietti writes. Inside the animal wail of these poems for a "broken country" and a life on hold, there is sage advice on how to move past the present. As Muschietti brilliantly puts it:"I get along better with the future, but mostly with the distant future: I fantasize big time." —Aviya Kushner, author of WOLF LAMB BOMB and The Grammar of God

Clara Muschietti’s poems have the immediacy of photographs, but also their disquiet: they present themselves candidly to the reader before revealing, bit by bit, their strangeness, their secluded disturbances, their expressive shadows, even their humor. Curtis Bauer has translated these taut, charged poems with attention to their colloquial frankness and respect for their emotional ambiguity. “Luckily,” write Muschietti and Bauer together, “there’s such a thing as the indecipherable.
—Robin Myers, translator of Daniel Lipara's Another Life and Adalber Salas Hernández's The Science of Departures

As Clara Muschietti's clear, disbelieving and unrestrained voice in this book (a necessary reedition of the book Bajo La luna published in 2015) moves forward along the path--at times deserted, at times opaque and expectant--of one's own experience, two questions seem to appear behind the words and actions: who am I? what am I doing here?
—Mario Nosotti

It may seem a somewhat anachronistic and even trite reference, but I can't help thinking that Clara Muschietti embodies that Hemingway ideal that demanded elegance in suffering (or, to be more literal, grace under pressure, or even grace under fire). Both in life and in writing, Muschietti possesses extreme sensitivity, which in its reach is also precise and sharp and leads her to perceive insanely. But this perception (of herself and of the world), which so often manifests itself as suffering, is always imbued with humor. There is humor in her conversation, in her emails, in her Facebook posts and in her tweets, and there is humor, almost always, in her poetry. It is that humor that seems to give her this elegance in suffering.
—Laura Wittner