Elena Basile
she/her
Elena Basile is a teacher, translator, and poet whose work interrogates the spillages and constraints of translation as it moves along the queer edges of many interstitial dimensions. She teaches in the areas of translation studies, gender and sexuality, communication studies, and the health humanities at York University and at the University of Toronto. Her poetry is featured in the documentary Three Women: Adapting Lives Adopting Lines (Adriana Monti, AZ Media, 2010). She contributed to Here and Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian Writing with a suite of poetic experiments in self-translation.
Excerpt from Proximacies (2020) by Elena Basile
Per Angela
Portami la morte in dono
intaglio dritto al cuore
apprenderò a farne rosa
petalo per petalo sfogliando
in tondo
questa caduta
al vuoto
senza tregua
eccitato alla delicatezza
impassibile con cui mordi
il filo d'ultima riga
a offrirmi in pasto il mondo
poche parole
rosolate in gola
nel silenzio delle dita al lavoro
sulla tastiera
Stupirà questo momento
altrove quando di lettura
s'affretterà l'ignoranza ardente
d'un altro senso
sospeso alla giuntura
che scalcita
dietro il verbo
meta senza scampo
solo fioritura
For Angela
​
Bring to me death as gift
cut straight to the heart
turn it into rose
petal by petal leafing
around
this ceaseless
fall
of nothings
excited at the cool
tenderness with which you bite
the thread of the last line
and feed me to the world
few words
lightly seared in the throat
in the silence of fingers at work
on the keyboard
In the wonder of elsewheres
of passion
and ignorance
quickened toward
a different sense
suspended at the seam
thickening being
into the fray
of verb
​
and blossom