"ana my language always broken all ways lost ana my language wa i miss my people" --suheir hammad, breaking poems, 51 "ana all this time translating waves into language bas missing what i had wanted to say" (Hammad, 45) If "translatio" is a bearing across, a passage, then what is borne forth and at what peril? What breaks down in the passage? What remains enfolded within the abyss of the break? In Suheir Hammad’s Breaking Poems (2008), poetry itself surges as translation, of the unsayable into a new language, of another’s poetry into a continuation of poetry. A break, which is an « instrumental passage in … music, » recalls poetry’s affinity with translation. Hammad’s poems propose that breaking is the very possibility of language and of poetry. In the poems where Arabic words are constitutive of the very English she forms, the rhythms of Arabic link the breaks of the lines; the untranslatability is the very thing that allows for the poem, not as an essential difference between languages, but as a tie that complicates where one language begins and another ends. Arabic left mostly without translation in the poems emerges as infinitely translatable, as it flows in the rhythms that announce unspeakable breaks. In a syntax that fractures, the Arabic ‘wa’ of conjunction continues one language into another, into one poetic language. Her poems are at the limits of a monolingual reading. The poem that reconstructs shows the fractures already there in any language. The break emerges as the natural rhythm of language, and of poetry, a link of history and of poetry, an innovative aesthetic that speaks more forcefully to new realities, the sounds that have not found any cultural accommodation. It is a poetic language that ties and cuts and flows in the face of the fragmentation of a “self,”, the dispersion of a “people,” and the shrinking of a “geography.” Poetry as translation emerges as an encounter, a gathering of languages, of bodies, of voices, of sounds.