In Translation

I've been reading poetry not in English, my favorite way of reading other languages.

In Spanish I read bilingual editions - Spanish on one side of the page spread, English on the other. So I always have at least an idea of what's going on in the poem. It's a way for me to expand my literary horizons, get a sense of the beauty of the language, see vocabulary in context, and cement what I've started to learn. My favorite Spanish-language poets from this last year are Alejandra Pizarnik - there's a line of hers I want as a tattoo someday, palabra por palabra yo escribo la noche - and Roberto Bolaño. I'm currently working my way through an anthology of Latin American poetry that will probably take me, oh, five years to finish.

German is another matter. My passive German is good enough that I can attempt to read in the original (though always with dictionary in hand). Some poets are more challenging than others, for sure. I'm reading one right now who uses very specific natural history terms, not ones I've encountered before. The problem for me with some of these is that the words can have multiple meanings depending on the context - and I know one meaning of the word, but not the one she's using. So as I'm going through the poem I see references to things that don't make sense to me - but it's a poem, right? Metaphors and symbolism and all that. I'm all for one thing meaning another in the context of a poem, I do that myself. It didn't even occur to me at first that I needed to look up these words I thought I knew the meaning of, not just the words I knew I didn't recognize. (It doesn't help that this poet doesn't capitalize the nouns, not even the proper ones, so I've already had one layer of linguistic cues stripped away.)

As I've been reading these poems and thinking about translations I've been seeing another place where I have to translate - Twitter. There are words, mostly abbreviations, that I don't know, and common words that have acquired new meaning.* There are gifs and emojis - not just emoticons but emojis - none of which I feel skilled in using. There's the need to scan for additional context, especially to be sure I understand the emotional tone of the comment, and the need to hold back, and then hold back some more and weigh my words before I attempt to say something, knowing some things don't translate well to print. Like, most of my attempts at humor. And then, because Twitter is sometimes an odd mix of public and private discourse, of knowing when not to get into a conversation at all.

And yet, as with the poetry, it's worth the effort, as I encounter beauty and bravery over and over again. People shining a light into the world, word by word by word.**

In love with all kinds of words,
Annie

*Like "crickets", to mean a response of awkward silence. This may be my favorite new word usage. I'm not 100% certain I encountered this usage on Twitter, but it feels like I might have.

** I know there's a lot of negative use of Twitter but apparently not in my little corner of it, knock on wood.