Elizabeth Macklin

An absolutely independent new CD by Mikel Urdangarin, Anek idatzi dit zutaz (Ane Wrote Me About You)....

Translation

The poet was trying to teach me
the flavor of a pending word,
a word for a dangling kind

of awaiting, contained, he said,
in the very sound of the word,
for which we had nothing easy.

Casting about, casting out and finding
only an orange, bobbing; another;
a purple for which we had no rhyme.

This kind was not “impatient”; no Southern
biding. A slow fast toward food. Wasted no time.
And so I had to find another way of conveying

a long, long moment of waiting
alert to catch a slight sign, any day
the whole length of our wait.

—Elizabeth Macklin

In the hopes of forestalling misunderstanding, a short list of Basque national poets (twentieth-century division):

* Xabier Lete (1944--) - Alas, can’t find anything at all in English.

The list could go on (since there is, obviously, no single Basque National Poet).