Isolate a portion of the piece you brought with you to the workshop; this could be a voice, an image, a location, a thing. In response to this unit of the text, write a new poem or short essay that focuses on and expands this unit of the piece.
As you write, consider the friction you experience when adding your voice to a text that is not your own, of being inside someone else’s text.
In the comments section of this blog post, paste your response to the writing prompt. Feel free to comment on other’s work and reflect on your process.
Poetics of Translation Series 
We should post here, right? 😅
I focused on the idea of the elusive, rag-tag muse as something pursued by a writer (though the muse is not attainable in reality) in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem, “Muse.”
Unauthorized, sneaking in, slipping
away without offering a shoulder for crying.
I follow her path with my eyes –
Though she’s already passed.
Beneath her darkened eyes
A fire blazes against me.
With weathered hand,
I capture her likeness – then forget it.
She wears a tattered train,
Stumbles – across pages.
Not a hint of malice yet screams malintent,
Though honestly, she’s just distant.
She’s not crying, not bargaining,
Simply comes and goes – like my passion!
With weathered hand,
I capture her likeness – then forget it.
I forget it – and, scattering the pages,
Like a guttural series of groans…
“May God be with her,
Though she’s already passed!”
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This isn’t a poem I’m intimately connected to, but recently for work, I directed one of our volunteers reading this. I spent about an hour reading and parsing and researching the text so I had an idea what this poem was about and how it could be read. One thing that struck me from the first time I read it was the activeness of the leaves and dust. I took Dickinson’s lead and wrote a little paragraph focusing on the storm from the perspective of the leaves.
A Thunderstorm by Emily Dickinson
The wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low, –
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.
The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.
The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands
That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.
———-
“The leaves unhooked themselves from trees…”
The sun shone brightly on a crisp autumn afternoon. The orange, yellow, brown, gold, amber, and pumpkin-colored leaves were rustling in the light breeze. They were discussing their plans for the season, namely who would leave first. As they planned which leaf would fall when, they notice the wind pick up and the grass rock below them. Low and threatening tunes filled the air and they knew they would have to make new plans. One by one — and then in bunches — the leaves unhooked themselves from the trees in order to escape the incoming chaos. They noticed the wagons below them and the dust below the wagons take the leaves’ lead in avoiding the storm. However, as is often the case, by the time you hear the storm approaching, it is often too late.
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I took a few lines from Maria Negroni’s book “The Annunciation,” where she personifies different concepts/facets of herself/facets of her narrator (it’s up to interpretation). From p. 94: ” ‘How come you didn’t call me earlier,’ snarled Nobody. ‘Everything’s a mess, I might have been able to help. I’m in no denial about reality.’ ”
Nobody is in no denial. It would only make sense that Somebody is in some denial. So I created/slipped these two characters, No-denial-body and Some-denial-body, below.
No-denial-body and Some-denial-body walked down the street. One was present and one was not, but they both continued walking anyway. No-denial-body was under no illusions about this fact. Some-denial-body thought that no-denial was itself the illusion. They walked and walked.
No-denial-body spoke: “I might have been able to help.”
Some-denial-body also spoke: “How could you? You aren’t even there.”
They walked on and on.
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The portrait hung on the wall of the district governor’s study. The grandson’s curiosity was frequently occupied by this unknown yet familiar figure, who had lived on his wall since some mysterious time before his earliest memories. He would often hold silent conversations with the ancestor. Nothing did the dead divulge. Nothing did the boy receive. This habitat seemed to be an appropriate choice for that artifact. A room painted in shadowy splotches- enclosed in brown, outlined in grey, and with a touch of red from the stiff armchairs, all acting as a mirror to the corresponding dark splotches used, perhaps before the beginning of time, to reproduce the austere visage of the baron. However… the room smelled of smoke. The portrait hung on the wall of the district governor’s smoking room.
The inspiration for this brief writing was the ambiguity of a specific word. The scene is taken from an excerpt of Joseph Roth’s “Redetzkymarsch” which I have been translating from its original Austrian German. This particular scene, which describes a grandson’s fascination/fixation over his dead grandfather’s portrait, takes place in a room referred to by Roth as the “herrenzimmer,” (gentlemen room) which is commonly translated as the “study.” I ‘distilled’ the passage into a description of the room and of the grandson’s thoughts, some of which was exploratory and additive. But in my own process of translating I later came upon a scene which took place in a separate room: the “arbeitzimmer” (work-room), which is translated as… the “study.” At this point I had to assign two names to this distinct room, and while arbeitzimmer is much more accurately a study, herrenzimmer has a less common translation: smoking room. So (using the find&replace function) I changed the setting of all of those previous scenes- slightly. The title of the room changed, but to what extent did the rooms themselves change? Or the meanings of the original? What connotations are shared by “study” and “smoking room,” and which ones are mutually exclusive. And in my writing does the scene change if you read it back replacing the first sentence with the last? I think these questions reveal one of the many “fault lines” that Brossard mentioned, and only begins to get at the subtle tensions that present themselves in translation.
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Love the subtlety.
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The Part That Sings
His head is
at the window. The only
part
that sings.
— Amiri Baraka
a hummingbird is not known for singing, it whirs
& blurs at my window, at lavender, yarrow, sage
the beak, the tongue, tasting, feeding, I watch at
the window, the red throat the steady mark, color
a blur yet red, rufous, greater than glitter of
cobalt blue, emerald green, a hummingbird sings
by being, by looking at me, at flowers, at the cat
mid-pounce, the moment when bright colors
blurred motion, cease, now throat, head, wings
are black, a hummingbird half its living size, a bit
between cat’s jaws, a bit never laced to a bridle
an unbridled act, now the beak a spear, a thorn
seen through the window, two heads at my window
one bird, one cat, no longer any part that sings
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For this workshop, I based my writing on a poem I am currently translating for a class, Arcadian Boutique by Mara Pastor, that I love.
Their houses slowly filling of a theme
Filling up something more than their house they would hope
In every house at least one wardrobe
If not a long table
and surrounding it its antique chairs
That on it remained the smell and memories
of the deceased owner who they’ll never know
And a silly piece of authenticity will make it better
but the important thing is not that they know
but that society will
That their eyes filled of jealousy
From these elaborate wood carvings that now fill their houses
That gives seat to their status
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Their stillness fascinated me. The first time my eyes met those of the axolotl’s, I sensed their secret will, their dissolution of space and time with an indifferent immobility. The guard’s distant cough and the constant ticking of the clock could not disturb my focus. Elsewhere, other fish glared at me stupidly. But I only had eyes for the axolotl. The gill contraction, the tentative reckoning of delicate feet on the stones, the abrupt swimming (some only make the slightest of body undulations), their eyes that spoke to me of the presence of a different life. From my position behind the glass, my gaze absorbed the axolotl. In my reflection there yearned a desire to enter their infinitely slow and remote world, a desired that sat within and beyond. I leaned closer; my reflection faded as I tried to better see those glassy orbs on these rosy creatures. It was useless to tap the glass directly in front of them with a finger; they could not be disturbed. Those eyes just burned with a soft, terrible light that melded all reflections. They continued to look at me from an unfathomable depth. I was so lost in it that I became dizzy.
“Axolotl” (1964) by Julio Cortázar
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