The Brooklyn Rail

Something I always admired about Cole was the way she seemed to live outside of time, or rather, the way she seemed to move so unencumbered by its linear progression, to move easily between different periods and bring traces back to us. Her translations, in particular, are always transporting—reading them, you can feel how much of herself she put toward understanding, intoning the work of poets like Alejandra Pizarnik, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, some of the most important, revolutionary, and difficult poets of their time, ones that draw nuanced, persistent readings, through a poet’s ear, what Cole had. I remember hearing her read from her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik one night at Wendy’s Subway—she was captivating and I was intimidated, inspired as ever, the way she embodied the work, talked about it passionately afterwards to anyone who approached her, later hearing how her confidence, brilliance, sense of humor, quixotic nature inspired and influenced her students endlessly, not at all surprising. I admired her freedom to roam, her sharp focus, her intelligence, I learned from it and admired it afar and in any conversation we had about poetry, any reading where we crossed paths. A line from her translation of Pizarnik’s A Tradition of Rupture always echoes, from an interview: “Outside the miniscule secret society of poetry lovers, everyone is afraid to recognize that an encounter with the poem could have freed them. Freed them from what? But this too everyone knows.”

Thank you Cole, for all of you.