The Translator's Husband
(translated by Inara Cedrins)

My eyes were kissed by frosty morning
A short train, therefore abnormally full
But you still lie in the unjustifiable sleep of this world

My daily stint at the salt factory over
So tiring, that this evening I'm not good for much
Yet you're lively and we both romp in the snow

At dinner you tell me about your dream
For a while we still shuffle the tattered deck of cards
Then you start to translate, I let myself into sleep, astral and gentle

*  *  *

In order to draft two stanzas, eight minutes are needed, ten
One of them has been begun in the head at dawn
And pauses later like a little old lady at the tram stop
Like a cloud over a field of hay or cow's teat over pail

The main thing is not to eat too much halvah
With full tummy one can't leap onto the back of a poem
There's metaphor, here too, down the center dark water
And a yacht's sail from a napkin









Eduards Aivars’s real name is Aivars Eipurs; he was born in Latvia in 1956 and studied Latvian Language and Literature at the Latvian State University. He has published seven collections of poetry since 1985, with Es pagāju (I Passed) receiving the Poetry Award in 2002. It was regarded as marginal at first, but turned out to be a forerunner of the nineties; he has come closest to deconstruction. AInava kliedz (The Landscape Cries) is considered most significant, having influenced a generation of poets. His poetry has been translated into Lithuanian, Hungarian, Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian, Spanish and English.


Inara Cedrins is an artist, writer and translator of Latvian descent who received her B.A. in Writing from Columbia College in Chicago and her M.A. in Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her anthology of contemporary Latvian poetry, written while Latvia was under Soviet occupation, was published by the University of Iowa Press, and she is currently working on a new Baltic anthology. A collection of her poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published by the Virtual Artists Collective; she currently lives in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area.