These gray days I’m back home in writing heaven, that is, workshop, through the On Deck Writers’ Fellowship. I meet with a talented and generous group every week and get regular, attentive feedback on my work. I didn’t know how much I missed it, even when this un-incarnated Zoom format replaces a circle of writers in a friend’s living room. I’ve re-dedicated to my craft with these people, the trade I first apprenticed to at Stuyvesant High School, known for its math but with gems in the English department.
One way is through reading more, old teachers and new prospects. Troweling back into John McPhee’s Basin and Range, I savor new English words like geologists lick (some) rocks to discover their character. McPhee is one of a few authors from whom I regularly learn new words in my native language, disincluding authors teaching (or just using) disciplinary jargon. Here’s berm according to the Oxford Pocket Dictonary of Current English:
BERM /bərm/ I. noun 1. a flat strip of land, raised bank, or terrace bordering a river or canal. 2. path or grass strip beside a road. 3. an artificial ridge or embankment, e.g., as a defense against tanks. 4. a narrow space, especially one b/w a ditch and the base of a parapet
Erm…. rad!
Now that I’m writing again—and thanks in no small part to the evidence I have for that through this newsletter—I’m comfortable enough naming myself a writer. I write.
In this reading I came across the below animate stanza in Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s “Clochard,” as translated by Clare Cavanagh:
“The gray chimeras (to wit, bulldogryphons,
hellephants, hippopotoads, croakodilloes, rhinocerberuses,
behemammoths, and demonopods,
that omnibestial Gothic allegro vivace
unpetrify”
My marginalia attest to my delight, as does the fact that I regaled my roommate with several stanzas. It was just that important that she hear this joyful noise right now after her 12-hour shift as an EMT. I wondered aloud, if Cavanagh had this much fun with the translation, what COULD be going on in the Polish?!
Her response caught me off-guard: you’re such a translator!
And… I am, as a matter of fact.
I’ve translated a Late Antique medical poem as a final project instead of a seminar paper for an ancient science class in my PhD program, given a virtual talk about the value of translation as scholarship at the Annual Meeting of the national professional organization for classics, and translated Reformation Latin letters and records from monasteries’ land disputes from Byzantine Greek, alongside way too many formulaic Latin diplomata, as a freelancer. I was the graduate assistant to the Translating the Future conference who helped reimagine how it would look during a pandemic. I contributed translations of Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei to The New York Anthology of Latin Prose, a lovely project growing out of a prose composition class at my institution.
So there’s data, there. But it didn’t occur to me to call myself a translator until my roommate did. I am so grateful to her for that christening.
It’s a title I think I admired too much to adopt, even as most literary translators are more often blamed—the verbal artistry must’ve been there and lost in transmission—than named.
So, call me translator! I’ll take it now, if you do, anyway.
New Book Project: Deciduous Green
Quick pivot back to writing, since I’m still a shy translator. Going forward I’ll be reflecting in The Sandbox on my process in writing a new chapbook with the working title Deciduous Green: Learning to See. I’ve gotten meta about the benefits and service of sharing during creation often enough here, so I’m excited to make a more concrete public commitment: listen to me write a book! I promise to reflect my view of things other than my navel, but I’ll also separate that section out so it’s easy to skip for those reading for other reasons.
I envision the book as a series of poems, perhaps with some mini-essays, many or all paired or interleaved with photos I take. The poem I shared last week is prelude.
The title refers to how I used to think of Maine and New Brunswick as a drive-through state and province, respectively, with just a whole lot of deciduous green forest for scenery along I-95. I have a visual processing disorder that definitely contributes to my weak picture memory and missing out on details, but I’m increasingly realizing that that knowledge of myself is a limiting and unnecessary frame. Regardless of my underlying neurology, I can “learn to see”—and have—through my creative practices that include photography, through conceptual models I internalized from science training, and actively working through, around and beyond the traumas that have, at times, limited my world and worldview.
The other guiding philosophy that I mean the title to gesture to is wondering at and reveling in ordinary phenomena, which are of course extraordinary. In the below photo, I see in the lone white pole in the foreground an opportunity to write about the geometry of simple forms, the starkness of colors and the difference between light and pigment, ways that humankind can be unobtrusive in how it enters into the natural landscape (but can it, in this public park?) and on and on.
Prompted by the below picture, I could riff on how my mind’s eye sees this tree reaching towards me with its branches (more closely related to arms in Latin than English), how it sees in trees now what I didn’t once—the sense of motion in tension with the singularly still and rooted nature of plants. I see characters, an Ent, I wonder how this tree would speak, I’m planning a photo essay on its trunk extirpating its tall life history.
Wherever this chapbook goes, whatever its eventual name, right now this framing of it brings me joy and rustles childlike: write!
Yours,
Jamie
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