Life in Translation

I forgot my mic when I came outside to record today. And by "forgot" I mean I spent ten minutes searching after very specifically taking it out of my office last night so I could use it this morning.

It's how it always is, isn't it? No matter what, there's always going to be that impediment. That thing that stands between us and our grand work of utter creative genius actually being realized.

One of the true challenges in creative work is defining your boundaries without becoming trapped in them. I'm literally watching a ram try not to get its head stuck in an old pallet as I say this. And I'm sitting on a bench coated in ice. These are the creative constraints I've set for myself: recording outside whenever possible, as unscripted as possible, with minimal editing.

These are the kinds of constraints you hear when people start a new creative project. You sit down with your guitar and play the song you love, then you start varying on it, and eventually you arrive somewhere of your own. Anyone who started out writing fanfic probably feels that right now.

I had a rough relationship with poetry as a kid and even into my early teaching years. I love poetry, especially when it's married to music to form a song. There's a power in that punched-up reality. It's like a linguistic hyper-color comic book.

But poetry also has a problem. You sit down to read a poem and it's full of invisible rules. How am I supposed to appreciate a sonnet for its rhyme scheme when half those rhymes don't even work in modern English anymore?

My gateway to enjoying poetry came from two places.

The first was haiku. Haiku gave me somewhere to focus not on the flow of language but on the strength of the image. And knowing I was reading translations. I knew that in the multiple versions of a single poem I could wrestle with the decisions each translator made, on top of the layered choices the original poet made. That deepened everything for me, as well as giving me a degree of otherness that excused any misunderstanding.

The second was a single poem by E. E. Cummings: a leaf falls in loneliness.

That is the poem. I've just said every word of it.

I've said more than it says.

What makes that poem so evocative compared to, say, thirty-six pages of intense emotionality about angels and hipsters? (and that's not a knock on the Beats, who were actually another path into poetry for me, unexpectedly.)

What the Cummings poem does is rely entirely on breaking the rules of how words are supposed to appear on a page. Even the title doesn't adequately express where the punctuation falls, where the words fall. It doesn't destroy our concept of what a poem is. It invites us to step outside the left-to-right pattern and contemplate what it would mean to read top to bottom. To let go of embedded clauses and archaic punctuation invented in the 1600s for newspaper profits. To remember that most of human experience (and most of the world's languages) doesn't move the way English populates a page.

I didn't come out here today planning to talk about E. E. Cummings or haiku. I was going to tell you about Blindsight, a novel that is strangely, intentionally wrong. Intentionally off-putting. .

I don't know that I can fully recommend it for most people, but it's one of those texts I love to imagine recommending, because: if you can read Blindsight and still hold onto an inkling of faith in humanity or the divine... and if you can read poems in translation (or poems that deliberately break your expectations of your native language) and not necessarily enjoy them, but hold them without rejecting them... then you're doing something hard and important.

Holding the conflicting nature of a deeply dark novel that gives me hope. Poems meant to lock us into a specific time and place and emotion, delivered in translation. Poems whose visual representation is greater than the literal sum of their parts.

Taking all of that in. Not rejecting it. Understanding its purpose and integrating it into your own creative thinking.

That's one of the hardest things about telling stories.

Or living.