Creative Translation of the poem “The Eel,” by Eugenio Montale

Let's workshop this bitch!

The Eel 

The lure of the eel is irresistible.
Having all of us feel its seductions,
it courses from its own frigid Baltic
to our own seas and estuaries, 
up our own rivers and creeks,
into our own patches of mud even.

One day light glints off the chestnuts
and penetrates wells and ditches, 
disclosing the eel in the stagnancy.
The light roils her up in those wells
and in those ditches cascading down
the flanks of the Apennines to Romagna.

The eel now heads to the Adriatic.
It is becoming something else as it does:
a torch that guides, a whip that goads.
This earthly arrow of love guides and goads
the gullies and cracked beds of the Pyrenees 
back to a wet paradise of procreation.

The eel now becomes less physical.
It is that soul, that spirit, seeking green life 
in the gnawing of drought and desolation.
It is that spark that says, “All starts 
when all appears charred black, 
when all looks like a buried stump.”

The eel now compels us to see it as kin.
It is that little iris twinned in your hair,
matching the ones that are your eyes.
These flowers have you vivacious 
in the midst of young men mired in your mud. 
How can you think it is not your blood sister?

*This creative translation first appeared in Loaded Bicycle (2013)