[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Matt—

Wow! This was the thunderbolt of inspiration I was hoping for. I incorporated many of your suggestions and feel that they greatly improved the tet version to the extent that I now prefer it to the pentameter version. Your advice to return to García Lorca’s punctuation was inspired. My English teacher compulsion to correct sentence fragments was getting the better of me. The periods slow the tempo and help each image to shine. Your point about the scorpion line was also a revelation. I was able to get rid of the inversion, clarify the image, and get rid of the “gild” that was annoying Carl.

I decided to expand the ocean imagery, even though it moves the translation away from literal toward adaptation. It all hangs on one reference to the ocean in S2L3, but I added the gray ocean in S1L2 and the shipwreck in S3L3. I decided that a gray seascape was more desolate than any gray landscape I could imagine, and I like the image of the “shipwrecked heart” even though it stretches the meaning of hundido almost to the breaking point.

Thanks so much for your inspired help. Thanks, too, to Carl and David. All three of you constant readers have taught me a great deal as I do my apprenticeship as a translator.
Glenn