In her poem, Tara Bergin crosses the lines through her re-interpretation of fragments of Leonardo da Vinci’s Miscellaneous Notebooks. She considers translation as a form of crossing that sometimes results in crossed lines — misinterpretation — and works with the possibilities it unlocks for poetry.
Where is Valentino? was commissioned for the publication To Step Across the Line and published in August 2018.
Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. In 2016 she received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Prizes. It was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the Times and the Irish Times. Tara now lives in the North of England and lectures part-time at Newcastle University.