Plague Diary, 23 March, 2020.

“Plague Diary,” a prose poem by Portuguese writer Gonçalo Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn, chronicles the speaker’s experience during the first month of lockdown during the pandemic. The first-person narrative poem transitions from observations to abstract associations, reflecting a lack of stimulation. The speaker’s sole connection to the outside world is through television. In one instance, he witnesses Matteo eating “a forkful of pasta beside the window that looks over Vittoria De Sica / street. / Sica was the director of The Bicycle Thief” (Tavares). By alluding to a movie that concludes with the protagonist’s abandonment and emptiness, Tavares establishes a sense of despair haunting the speaker. Tavares employs a stream-of-consciousness style to blur the boundaries between reality and media consumption, revealing how the speaker’s perception of the pandemic is shaped by this ambiguity. Lockdown compels the speaker to seek solace in television, but instead, he becomes trapped in the 24-hour cycle of the news until he switches it off. Through this poem, Tavares challenges the notion of modern interconnectedness, particularly in the context of the pandemic, where what should foster connection instead evokes collective dread and paranoia.