I am continuing with my sound based translations of Mins Loy’s poetry. This play with words is something I have always enjoyed - I remember being given long words in school (‘Constantinople’ stands out) in which we had to find as many words as we could. One way of keeping a class of nine years olds quiet? When I worked in the local technology campus library we had a routine of completing The Times crossword over our morning cup of tea as a team effort then doing the word finder - a bit more competitive. This concentration on one word and the potential within it, whether for meaning or sound, is what attracts me to poetry. I like using constraints or procedures as these allow me to set my own rules but make the results more unpredictable - like producing a puzzle of words that I can look for connections in and that can throw up unexpected meanings. Perhaps it is that I have learned to not read poetry for a definitive meaning and so it doesn’t matter to me to have clarity throughout a piece of writing. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense as long as it is held together in some way. Perhaps by rhythm or structure or repetition of sound. One of my favourite reads is Joyce’s Finnigan’s Wake. There are moments of clarity where sense as well as word play and sound can be detected but then there are points at which there is no point in trying to force sense. The sound is enough. Something like hearing snatches of different conversations. You catch part but it moves and changes before you get a complete picture. As is our experience of words, sounds, meanings - it seems rarely can we fully understand the masses of language moving around us especially at the speed it often passes through us. And sense changes anyway - other sense layers continually deepen and change our perception and reaction to information. This is why I don’t go for a poem that makes complete sense. Sense never can be complete. There’s always another something to bring to the mix.
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I have started work on some sound based translations of the beautiful Mina Loy’s poetry. Her poems are composed of striking language and I was afraid that in losing these words in the translation the results would be very much impoverished. However it occurred to me that making too direct comparison with the original is not the point of the exercise. A permission to continue? Geraldine Monk talks about her collaborations with the dead (they can’t answer back) and makes the point that ‘collaboration with the dead is collaboration without permission’ (quoted in the Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk). This using other writers’ work is bothersome. It feels something like cheating to not create my own poem from scratch on a blank page without help from a finished piece by someone else. But then why the cry that in order to write you must read. To what end if not to learn from who you read. Yes, the technique I am using produces a new poem that is heavily indebted to the original poem that it is a sound based translation of, but the new poem is created, as the technique suggests, as a skewed sound mirror of the original. Most interesting for me is how the new poem continues some of the sense of the original, even though it is composed of different words, and how concentrating on creating sound effects dictates word choice and enters ‘surprise’ meanings in the new poem. Perhaps the time of year and the state of the economy is seeping into my writing as today’s translation of the wonderfully titled ‘Wing Shows on Starway Zodiac Carousel’ has more than a hint of politics in it. Very unintentional. And no, I haven’t come up with anything to match that title yet. Not sure I’ll try.
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October 2017
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