"Some objects translate without losing the original. The collar is one of those."
On the balcony, Bairro Alto
A Sunday in February, the tide low
Sea wind from the south. Clear, cold.
Léonor lives on the fourth floor of a building older than most countries. We climb the stairs. She is reading a poem in Korean when we arrive, aloud, to nobody. "It is a good poem," she explains, "and it does not have anyone else to read it to it." The collar sits on her clavicle as if it had always been there. She makes us coffee that we do not finish.
The Chain Collar, photographed at noon
"A chain is a sentence — link after link, each one a small decision. You can break a chain in many places and remake it. You can break a sentence the same way."
—Léonor de Sá
We talk for two hours about translation — which is to say, about love, and about loss, and about the impossibility of saying the same thing twice. She does not take the collar off, even to lean over the small dictionary on her lap. Her hands are full of language. The collar, in the wash of February light, is a kind of punctuation.
Her typewriter, an Olivetti, blue
The conversation
Q.
A collar is a heavy thing. Was that hard to choose?
LE.
No. I am a heavy person. The collar agrees with me. We do not pretend.
Q.
What do you think about, when you put it on?
LE.
I think about translation. A chain is a sentence — link after link, each one a small decision.
Q.
You wear it to sleep. Why?
LE.
I dream better with weight. I have always slept with a book on my chest.
That day — Léonor had with her
Wearing
A grey sweater that is too large
Drinking
Coffee, the cheap kind, with milk
Reading
Kim Hyesoon, in Korean
Playing
A neighbour's piano, three floors down
On the bench
A typewriter. Two dictionaries. A clementine.
"I dream better with weight. I have always slept with a book on my chest."
We leave at dusk. She waves from the window. The collar — small, certain, gold — is the last thing the streetlight catches before we are around the corner and gone.
— In conversation withLéonor de Sá,Lisbon, Portugal.
She wears
Molten Heart Ring
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