from The Past is a Lonesome Town

The poems from The Past is a Lonesome Town are, on the one hand, lyric fragments shaped by coming of age in small-town Cuba during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime and, on the other, testaments of exile, traces of memory that remain after forsaking a problematic homeland. The English "prompts" are security questions immigrants are required to answer to establish bank accounts and services that the newly arrived Morales only half-understood. Indeed, given Morales’ characteristically unflinching irony, these questions have trenchant implications for the poet’s new “American” identity. 
 
A special challenge in “carrying over” into English Morales’ often oblique, associative ingots is rendering the intelligently flustered tone of the motivated immigrant faced with obstacles to his future and filled with lucid images of the past—speakers who exist literally between, like the translator between the two linguistic traditions. Cuban Spanish also has its own nuances, and I was lucky to be able to have Morales himself to consult. Robert Frost famously said poetry is what’s lost in translation, but it’s also what’s found there.