Difficult Differences

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"Can the poet speak for others while at the same time expressing the conviction that he is "nobody" (like Ulysses)? Or feeling his own disauthorization? In modern times who has ever asked the poet to speak? Carlos Piera imagines himself as other in order to talk about his own circumstances but that is often, ironically, as an other who does not have a voice himself. And so there is Ahasuerus, who regrets having spoken, or the Palestinian mother, who sings a lullaby before a bomb may fall. The worst fate is to have no voice or to have one that is scorned: to be a Cassandra or an "old weed", unable to do much more than scream. Out of such contradictions poetry emerges."

-From the prologue by Roberta Ann Quance

As translator Roberta Quance explains, this compilation arose from a long and intimate contact with the poetry of Carlos Piera, from which the desire to translate it into her native language grew naturally.