Description
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Book Description
Like the Night Inside the Eyes is a memoir-in-poems about loss and family interwoven with similes from the Iliad, each bearing witness to the continuousness of the world with forces that unmake it. In this book, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, Daniel Lipara harmonizes the lyric and the epic—the personal and the impersonal—as he tunes into the cosmic harmony between creation and destruction—or what Lipara refers to as the “song of the glimmer,” the glimmer of the eye and the black hole in the eye, which widens in darkness, letting in light.
Praise
Daniel Lipara’s Like the Night Inside the Eyes, translated by Robin Myers, is simultaneously capacious and intimate, braiding the speaker’s process of translating the Iliad with the poet’s own experiences of love, family, illness, and loss. Here is a book that evades categorization, blending the personal with the literary, traversing seamlessly between the speaker’s memories and another’s text, creating a dream-like tapestry, which is what a full life feels like—a shimmering force field of joy and pain, of birth and death, of beauty and violence. This book is also a poignant record of what it feels like to accompany others in their journeys to the end of life. If “A simile is a reminder of what’s been lost,” then this book is a reminder of what remains. – VICTORIA CHANG
In Daniel Lipara’s poem, as in the Iliad, simile marks the exact site Death arrives by becoming lifelike, before withdrawing with our friends into its difference. How grateful I am to Lipara for this book of infinite capacity and infinite delicacy, and to Robin Myers for this translation, a play of tender likenesses where Death can rest its lithe and expert hand. – JOYELLE McSWEENEY
There is a long history of poets pillaging the Greek myths to serve their poetics; Daniel Lipara instead inhabits them, restoring them to their rightful place among us mortals. The death of his parents at a tender age is his Iliad and his subsequent grief is his Odyssey. We all know Achilles, but Lipara masterfully reminds us of Simeoisios, a boy who dies by the banks of the river he’s named after in the bloom of youth, a reminder of the fragility of life and all the possibilities we leave behind. Just like in those lines from the Iliad, we see Lipara’s entire emotional life encapsulated in these ethereally haunting poems. Few translations are as special as this one, given that Lipara is superbly translated by Robin Myers, who has become one of our generation’s indispensable translators from the Spanish. – ANDRE NAFFIS SAHELY
Inspired by Simone Weil and key moments in Homer’s Iliad, Daniel Lipara’s Like the Night Inside the Eyes is a work of exquisite and resonant juxtaposition. Cogent blocks of family-focused prose depicting Lipara’s Buenos Aires upbringing are braided with short, agile poems, animated by striking sensual details and vibrant similes (” A simile is a reminder of what’s been / lost. A single word is wreckage and light…”). This hybrid book is an astute and inventive work of quest and elegy. Faced with loss (“even now you look as fresh / as dew / as someone just killed / by the sun god’s soft arrow”), Daniel Lipara seeks wisdom and solace in investigating a timeless, mythic Mediterranean realm—one that mirrors our modern-day struggles for peace, balance, clarity, and self-integrity in a turbulent and forceful world. – CYRUS CASSELLS
About the Author
Poet and translator Daniel Lipara (Buenos Aires, 1987) is the author of Otra vida—translated into English as Another Life by Robin Myers (Eulalia Books) and longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry—and Como la noche adentro de los ojos, both published in Argentina by Bajolaluna. His translations from English to Spanish include works by John Burnside, Victoria Chang, and Bhanu Kapil.
Robin Myers is a poet and translator. She won the 2025 National Book Award in Translated Literature for We Are Green and Trembling, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (New Directions), and was shortlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry with The Brush, by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (Archipelago Books). Other recent poetry translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (Copper Canyon Press), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), and many others. Her poetry collection Centro is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
Excerpts & Reviews
Daniel Lipara, “from Like the Night Inside the Eyes,” Poetry Daily
Robin Myers, “The Beginning of Devotion: On Translating Daniel Lipara’s Like the Night Inside the Eyes,” Latin American Literature Today
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