On changes and poetry in translation

For me, this past summer was filled with margaritas and disposable days. I felt greedy, hoarding these hours with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It’s nice to be back to a more scheduled life,  to return to a classroom setting where I’m pushing myself to create poems rather than waiting for them to come to me. 

When I’m writing organically, my poem ideas usually start as one-word concepts: glacial, locusts, larvae. So in class, it was an easy transition for me to shift from attempting to capture the image words invoke into defining what they mean to me. I had forgotten how nice it was to be surrounded by writers, a community of people looking to write and explore poetry and translation together. 

I’m excited to see where this next semester takes me and my writing! I’ve always viewed poetry as my way of continually interacting with the mutable world around me, so the constantly changing nature of translation really intrigues me. The truest and most beautiful thing that pushes me into creating is the way that nothing lasts. Everything changes and passes. The creative process is just that. Not a means to an end, but a way to engage with being alive. I hope to improve my skills and continue to learn techniques that will bring my writing to a more advanced level.


One Reply to “On changes and poetry in translation”

  1. Welcome to the class, Kayla. Yes, I think it’s really important to be able to stay within the process, to defray the end (wasn’t that what “hoarding the hours” was partly about, anyway?) – not because the end is bad, or unwanted, but because along the way there’s things to be seen/discovered, including in words and images (“rebarbative” is the word occupying me this week, the word I’m dwelling on to see where it goes).

    I couldn’t help, in that last sentence, slip a sense of vector into hoarding: “where it goes.” Perhaps that’s inevitable in a class that focuses on “translating”: the syllabus wants to stay in process, in the moment, -ing. To avoid “translation” being a finished end. But at the same time, we do move from A to Z; we have an experience and compose it in words and capture it for someone else at another time and place. We travel, between termini. All this is to say that I’m excited to see the “organic” and evolving aspects of your poems, the attention they have to words – and I’m looking forward to learning what it is that feels most urgent or unavoidable in terms of poetics and/or content when you are “pushing yourself” to write.

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