Monday Poetry Post: Poetry (Not Quite) in Translation

Because being 'literal' is for prose

Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.

If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.

A couple years ago I participated in Elaine Kahn’s Poetry Field School. Throughout a series of meetings, I composed, workshopped, and revised several poems – since my session fell during NaPoWriMo, I was writing a poem every day, anyway, but having a structured class increased and improved my output.

One of the exercises I found most interesting and effective was a near-translation exercise, meant to help us access our peripheral brains. That sounds heady, but I’ve found that in poetry, the concepts that sound like real high-level practices are usually…fun stuff.

The exercise Elaine led involved taking a piece of text in a language we didn’t speak, then translating it on vibes alone. The goal, Elaine said, was to let our intuition, associations, and emotional connections to the language lead us to a different kind of understanding.

This makes sense to me. Writing a poem often feels like I'm trying to describe an experience I don't actually have language for. Only in trying to write the poem am I rewarded with the language. Until I try, it doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I decided to go an extra step (coughteacherspetcough) and choose a piece of text that could not be translated literally. Prisencolinensinainciusol was written, by Italian singer Adriano Celentano, to sound like English. But it’s gibberish.

So I set out to translate lines like “Ol uoit men in de colobos dai/Not s de seim laikiu de promisdin.”

What I got from that was “I AM NOT A RICH MAN, BUT YOU KNOW THAT/THE ONLY THING I HAVE IS MY WORDS AND MY BODY.” These are my interpretations, based only on how the words made me feel. I’m not sure if I would reach the same “translation” if I repeated the exercise with this song today.

And guess what? We’re not going to repeat this exercise today! I’ve adapted an easier version, because Monday Poetry should be Easy Poetry (and, yes, this is foreshadowing/a reminder to keep an eye out for the “pro” tier of this newsletter in January). In today’s exercise, we’ll be finding that “peripheral brain” space by using two existing pieces of text and creating a Venn diagram from the language, where our poem will come to exist.

We’re going to be using the marvels of modern technology to help us with this one.

Exercise: Borrowing Through Translation

You’ll need: two songs you love and Google Translate. The songs you pick don’t need to have an explicit link, but I find that it helps. Maybe they’re both songs with specific references to boat-related incidents. Maybe they’re both songs Adele has covered. Maybe they’re Under Pressure and Ice Ice Baby because hey, why not?

I picked two “bird songs” for my poem. In my example, I’m working with lyrics from Dissect the Bird by John Craigie and Birdhouse In Your Soul by They Might Be Giants. I’ve found that long songs with a lot of variety in the verses work well for this exercise, but you might find interesting things if you use a short song and a long song, or songs that include lyrics in multiple languages. Feel free to experiment.

Do you remember last week’s exercise? We spent half our time capturing language and half our time constructing a poem with it. Get ready to do the same thing today!

• Copy and paste the lyrics of one song into Google Translate. Make sure the left-hand column is set to”detect language.”

  • You can also do this in the search bar, just by looking up the word “translate,” but actually using the translate.google.com address will make things faster.

• Set a timer for one minute.
  Translate your song from the starting language into another, random language. Then, hit the arrow button that says “Swap Languages” when you hover over it.

  

  When you hit “Swap Languages” the translated text will become your source language, and you can choose a new language to translate it into.

  

  
  Translate your song lyrics for a full minute, cycling through several different languages. You can take a totally random approach. You can work your way through every “B” language in Google Translate, from Bambara to Bulgarian. You can speed-run and try to get as many translations as possible before your time is up. The choice is yours!
  
  When your time is up, translate back to your starting language and copy/paste the text into a word document.
  

• Set a timer for one minute.
  Repeat the above process with your second song, translating and re-translating the language over and over. When your timer goes off, copy/paste your text into the word document with your first song’s new lyrics.
  

• Set a timer for three minutes.
  Spend this time looking through the new text you’ve generated through translation. You may see some lines that are preserved, exactly the same as when you started. But you’ll probably have a LOT of lines that are “off.” Some words that had single meanings in the original lyrics may now have layered connotations, while other phrases may have been rendered very literally, and now sound very strange.
  
  Here are a few of my favorite lines from my experiment:

  • “It's a simple message and I'm leaving out the whistles and bells” became “simple language and all the bells and whistles”

  • The chorus from Birdhouse In Your Soul became “who cares about you/be a bird at heart, you don’t have many good moments/tell me I’m a bee.”

  • “So when the candle flickers, when the days get dark” became “the light came on and the sun went dark”

  • The chorus from Dissect the Bird became “oh, you're wrong, birdhouse/he’s trying to find songs/that’s a surprise”
    

  Isn’t it funny that the chorus which started as “birdhouse” became “bird,” and “bird” became “birdhouse”? That’s the peripheral part of this exercise at work – these songs are different on the surface, but much of the language leads us to the same emotional conclusion.
  

• Set a timer for five minutes.
  Using your favorite lines/phrases from the “bank” you’ve created, compose a poem. Try out different combinations and shuffle around the order.
  
  Here’s one note on that. When I’m writing a poem, I have a tendency to get attached to certain phrases or “chunks” of language. Sometimes I accidentally trap myself by getting really attached! That happens more during exercises like this one, where I’m building a poem with language I didn’t come up with myself.
  
  One thing that helps: I think of language as Barbie furniture. It is so easy to move around, and it is so easy to put back if I don’t like it. Words are not real furniture. I’ve never thrown my back out splitting an infinitive, and neither will you.
  

• In five minutes, you can have a first draft of a poem out of this exercise. You might even get it done before that if you do a very conservative version of this exercise, and keep the exact grammar of your translated language. But if you want to, go in and tweak tenses, add some connective prepositions where it’s necessary, pluralize things, etc. My songs ended up creating very easy-to-connect phrases and I wound up with a much more narrative poem than I anticipated.
  
  I lost track of time and wrote the below in eight minutes, but in my defense, I was having a lot of fun!
  

Jason Abandons His Quest In Order To Write Some Music

Jason listened to me:
cut the flames, to cool the sea;
summoned the new Argonauts
and stood ashore.

Even when nobody comes, he plays guitar
to the friendly green bird on the bedside table.
He finds songs – simple language, all the bells
and whistles from the aviary.

You don’t have many good moments, he tells the bee
in the birdhouse.
Tell me I’m a bee, he tells the canary.
I want to ask for attention, but it’s too much to ask,
he tells the rain.

The light comes on and the sun goes dark.
The trash is empty of paper. His writing is a ship
that saves him:

You have to go, your heart is broken.
Open your eyes.
It can’t be perfect. It can’t be right. But
for a long time, at least love something.

Yay! Look! Isn’t that a fun poem? “Cut the flames, to cool the sea” was an unexpected rhyme and also very metal. The “bluebird of friendship” became “the friendly green bird” somehow. I love the last line – when I noticed it in my lyric transcript, I knew I wanted to use it as a closer. This took minimal intervention from me to construct. I changed the tenses around quite a bit to align them, and then added the words “of paper,” but that’s the only real “editing” I needed to do. The rest was all building with the blocks I was given, baby. Phew.

You can use this as a way to write a fully-realized poem. You can use it to create a series inspired by your favorite album. You can use it as a jumping-off point for a totally different poetry project. And if you tried it and hated it, you never have to use it again…and I’ll be back next week with a new exercise for you to try!

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again in the Friday Dispatch, where I’ll write about Thanksgiving, why I disagree with critics of the revamped in-app Dunkin’ rewards system, and whether my cat is a witch. See you soon!