I’ve resumed work on a German-English bilingual “edition” —now a commitment—of the chapbook I’ve been working on for a while, “Deciduous Green: Learning to See.” It was a “born English” project I started back in March after pandemic malaise had me taking lots of photos in Prospect Park—reconnecting to an early love of photography—and I started writing about the process. Here’s how I described it to a writing group:
“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. Boooring. 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 above mediocre photo, I still see a lot to comment on: 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.”
Where did the German come in? Artificially: I decided I wanted to completely adhere to the German-only language pledge I was under this summer, while continuing to work on my chapbook. I definitely shoehorned many of my German poems into this framework. Once I had this “epiphany” of what brought my mess of photos and poems together thematically, I promptly stopped writing for a month, demotivated and constricted by feeling further work had to fit into this frame.
German helped open up the project again because it loosened the frame: I was in Vermont, in a different landscape, for one, and I was in a different part of my linguistic identity. I don’t give much credence to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—I don’t think differently in German, at least not by the nature of the language—but I do have a different life history, memories, and creative development in German and I think that matters. For example, I came to German as a more mature poet, older, wider-read, less self-focused, able to see more. My German “juvenalia” are from a very different kind of artistic infancy (I think…?), with its circumlocutions that sound poetic, maybe, because they’re linguistically weird wanderings when I can’t get directly to what I want.
So what I have at present is a mess of materials in lots of different places, two languages and two media that could serve as a fertile source for bottom-up building of a collection, rather than starting with an idea that bears little as soon as it is crystallized. I don’t have much of an idea of how or what it will turn out to be, and that’s stalled me too, but it feels like a much more productive lack of clarity—messing around with abundance, rather than squeezing work out of an abstraction that unified a neat few things.
On the language side, this feels like an opportunity to present a bilingual edition just because, which I don’t usually allow or extend myself to do. Most or all of the people I speak German with could also read an English monolingual version. I write mostly in English when I put out content, as you all have seen, reigning in my multilingualism because it’s a lot of unnecessary work to repurpose things in several languages—because writing in Spanish or German or Italian, and especially Latin, doesn’t reach many people I want to. But I’ve lived so much of my life and thought many of my thoughts not in English that I always feel sad, sometimes like I’m not honoring or recognizing my influences, when I straightjacket it into a monolingual body of work—English or other. I’ll be curious to see what comes out of self-translating, if that’s different depending on which language the first draft was in (not “original,” which, if anywhere, is in my head-, nonverbal language), or if the prompt was a phrase or a photo, etc.
Here’s a poem that was born in English, but I’ve only ever shared in the German version (and actually, the English version here is a further draft that was influenced by the German attempt, which in turn evolved further when I added it to a final summer project for a Philosophy and Literature course… I guess there’s already more translation here than I give credit to!):
Corona-Geometry, or the Origami World: What Euclid Couldn’t
”What a wonder to know we must not start all anew. That when we locked down the world some took thought to preserve what folds and forms they could. To tent and air its thin sheets and not press them into cardboard to crush for later recycling. What a wonder, how origami math gives us not only assurance that we can unravel (something/us) without breaking, but tender algorithms to help along that blooming. How we can go forth with mapper‘s compass into this developing world, enlarge it while in motion, come home to our straightedge and tight circles only to imprint what we have felt deeper on our heart.”
Corona-Geometrie, oder,
die Origami-Welt: Was Euclid nicht konnte
Was für ein Wunder, nicht ganz vom Anfang beginnen zu müssen, da manche sich darum kümmerten, der Welt ihre Falten und Formen zu bewahren, als wir sie zur eigenen Bewahrung hastig schlossen.
Ein Wunder, dass diese Prophetinnen ihre dünne Blätter gelüftet und erhöht haben, statt sie in Pappe zu pressen zu möglicher Wiederverwendung.
Was für ein Wunder, wie die Mathematik des Origamis noch jetzt uns eine Art Sicherheit schenken kann,
dass wir was/uns entwirren können, ohne uns/es unschön zu zerbrechen.
Doch gibt sie uns sogar zarte, ausführliche Anleitung dazu,
um das Ganze wieder blühen zu lassen!
Wie wir uns sicher nur mit dem Kompass in eine sich verbreitende Welt fortgehen können, sie vergrößern dürfen, während sie sich bebt. Kein dunkler Raum ist noch nötig
Dann gehen wir zwar zurück nach Hause, zu unseren Linealen und engen Kreisen—nicht mehr zur Bewahrung, sondern um das, was wir jetzt tiefer fühlen, tiefer aufs Herzen einzudrücken.
I don’t promise y’all anything but updates when I have them: you’ve seen this newsletter disappear more than once! But this is an invitation to ask and prod and react, and I do hope you’ll hear more from me about it.
Hit reply (I respond to every email) and share: What creative projects are you working on, or started and are not-working on? How can we support you?
Accountability partners or groups also welcome :)
Jamie
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