Translated by Alicia Partnoy
In Spanish translations that have the verve and intelligence of the original, Alicia Partnoy deftly conveys Gail Wronsky's brilliant riff on masks and mutability, on doubles and the doubling of desire. To "liberate dragonflies from their linguistic shrines," So Quick Bright Things meditates and mediates upon being and identity, how we couple, how we evaporate, how we peer "through the cracks in (the)...mask for/ a glimpse of something...infinite." Taking its title from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Wronsky's Oberon and Titania are hip with self-awareness and wry with lyric sadness that "what they were not...was magical." Wronsky's "fairyland" which mingles Bachelard, Peter Quince, Proust, naturally and without a stretch of artificial over-reaching, is also all too real; there's "Nothing in the world but rain and rags and/ their two beings rotating,? and to touch that reality is to "Rub it. / Rub it till it tears you apart." Like the best metaphysical poets, Wronsky's work sprite-like inhabits a realm where "Sometimes airy nothing escapes/unscathed, floats under the radar/...doubling all of us into eternity," and the body, Puck-like, is never forgotten.
—Rebecca Seiferle
