A first attempt at translating my own work.

As an exercise for myself in French, I attempted a straight translation of my last posted poem, And sometime drink whiskey with me. I made no attempt to carry over anything but the most basic of senses - the words themselves and the meanings of the clauses. It helped that it was a fairly simply poem to begin with. Here is the French version:


Et un jour bois whisky avec moi
pour que je vais te dire de
ma cache de mots ramassé
secrètement soigneusement
plumé
d'un bouche-piège de grand-père de quelqu'un. Ce Vieux Babillard Mâchoire-Fente-là.

Ou je vais te dire autres baliverne, mensonges, comme la soir fuit de façon précipitée.



I found to my surprise that the rhythm I uncovered with the English version, though modified, still seems to work. The syllables in lines four and five match perfectly. The hardest part was figuring out how to say "That Old Jawing Slit". I settled on, with help from two dictionaries, something that translates more literally as "That Old Talkative Jaw-Slit." I wish I knew French well enough to invent words - I just don't have a good enough grasp of the morphological nuances to do so.

The impossible part was what to do with line seven in the original poem, the line with the three words drawn out of the cache. I considered finding straight translations, but the actual meaning of those three words is secondary to their impact (though they were chosen for specific reasons) as dusty old relics. And I definitely do not know enough French to tackle those sort of nuanced pragmatics.

In retrospect, I would have tackled a different poem for my first go - one that didn't rely so much on lexical precision. My next goal, besides my own work, is to try a translation of e.e. cummings i will wade out, which I have also written about here.

And sometime drink whiskey with me

And sometime drink whiskey with me
so that I'll tell you of
my cache of collected words
secretly carefully
plucked
from someone's grandfather's mouthtrap. That Old Jawing Slit.
absquatulate, bafflegab, zograscope.

Or I'll tell you other nonsense, lies, as the night flees headlong on.

Old Photos That Stop A Soul

She gave
a quick glance over some old photo
clicked by, recalling that trenchant laugh
tinkling away at what hour it had and is now become;
or those innocent hands, folded, set
like starched stone grave markers at sunset;
a flash in the heart at the glimpse of calf;
later dancing, later kisses that tasted of rum,
but now, snipped out of time and so,
and so and so.

Song for Drunkards

We go out, we stumble about
Drink up the wine, make fools of ourselves

We go out, grumble on about
the distance involved from then to ourselves

We go out, rumble and shout
try to believe that the regrets will all pass

And we go out, should have gone back in
drunk up the wine, made fools of ourselves

Christmas Night, Tyler Street

The street went gray outside while we cooked
and then blue and black and purple and dark,
but around the edges, the ambiance cracked,
unfairly lit by Christmas trees
keeping vigil behind curtained windows
and each marking tense and pretending families,
so that the street lights looked sick
with forgotten love and near-dying faith.

And now the immobile urgency of a cat
sleeping in my lap - trapping me to my seat
with the tree and the tv glowing but silent,
with this pen and this crossword,
and the little white space aside
that for these marks must have been custom made -
unwinds the boredom and begins to lift
the gray fogs of an endless month.

Questions We Answered Next Week

1. A slow break-down,
hydro-fracturing deep
below us now.

2. A drumbeat goes
like thumbprints left on glass
white from soap-film.

These two odd ends
now shoe-boxed together
makes you wonder

about process and iteration,
doing the same things the same ways
as we've always done them
just like our mothers said to.

Only myself

From darkness, at the edge of hearing:

What might be voices
but is just leaky windows,
rubbing door jambs, a dog's sleeping belly-murmurs.

But I reach for the pistol under the pillow
or knife or bat.

Grip the handle
fingering, palming, tightening, tensing
white-knuckling, straining to listen, to hear
what isn't there.

I could get up and check the house.
Jiggle knobs and pad softly.
Peer around corners and squint at shadows.
Climb back into bed, assured.

But I lie still.
Now I am caught between
the terror of being murdered in my sleep and
the terror of looking foolish, if only to myself.

Dimming

in the dimming twilight of her twenties,
She turned from the outside in,
and gave nothing, and took nothing

her life had been a tragic series
the father left and somewhere died
her mother drunk or high, until a kind aunt
whisked the child up and fled

cancer killed the aunt, a car the other aunt
a foster family for a year, bounced twice,
distant cousins through junior high
her senior year on her own

so in the sadness of her teens,
She turned from the outside in,
and gave nothing, and took nothing

believing the up-from-down stories
of the successful she worked her way
through college, struggled, spent
her nights clearing tables of chinese food

a fight on some early playground
had left her nose an ugly bump, a broken flap
and she dated boys who didn't mind
a few months of being seen with her

in the lonely space between school and life
She fell without sound and did not rise again
but passionless and bored, she worked and nothing else,
She dimmed and turned from the outside in,
and gave nothing, and took nothing

-Friday, October Nineteenth 2007