Solar Journal

I thought I lacked any real discipline, the poet says. I thought I lacked some faculty of application, the patience to proceed day by day on a greater work; to labour at anything where gratification is not immediate. It was enough, I thought to be able to write anything at all – to make a kind of mark on the page, to sink another pole into the earth, attached by telegraph cable to the one planted the day before.

But those marks, over time, let a kind of continuity appear – the days behind me had been stitched together by what I'd written. The thread of writing was drawn through the skin of my life. I thought I had written nothing at all, that bare continuity was enough. I needed just to breathe, to practice. Just to press the instrument to my lips.

Continuity: strange miracle. It was from a thousand beginnings that a book might be made. I had set an example to myself, I who lacked discipline, even as I remembered by what was written only that writing had been possible.

So I had written a book. A book, though it was made of a thousand beginnings of a book. But a book nevertheless. I gave it a title: Solar Journal. I turned its pages alone in my flat. I thought: it has its own light. It glows. I thought: it has nothing to do with me. I wanted to push it away, to let it live according to its own law. A horse nudging a just-born foal: get up, stir yourself, live your own life.

It was to be given to others, published. I want to lose it by seeing it in print. And so it was, the poet says. My work of three years, of a thousand botched beginnings, appeared between cream-coloured covers. Solar Journal, said the title. My name, though I wish my name hadn't appeared on it. Solar Journal: the book you want to translate.