At my writing group meeting last Friday, we had a pretty cool poetry exercise: using literal English translations of poetry originally written in other languages, we had to transform the translations into our own poetry, or make the literal translation more “poetic”. Since I’m rather pleased with what I came up with, I thought I’d share my efforts here.<\/p>\n
The literal translation I worked with is based on the Romanian poet Nichita St\u0103nescu’s poem “Emo\u0163ie de toamn\u0103”, translated by our Romanian group member as “Emotion in autumn”. (ETA: the group member in question is Marlena Bontas<\/a>, who, among other things, writes awesome poetry.) Here<\/a> is the original poem in Romanian. Even though I know French, Spanish and a bit of Latin, it’s not enough to open up the Romanian for me – so the poem below is based entirely on the literal English translation we had at our meeting. It’s pretty close to the translation, but I’ve put my own spin on it. It turned out quite a “me” poem in the end, methinks. <\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Autumn Tremors<\/b><\/p>\n Autumn’s arrived \u2013 Sometimes I’m afraid I won’t recognise you, But then I reach the standing stones ***<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At my writing group meeting last Friday, we had a pretty cool poetry exercise: using literal English translations of poetry originally written in other languages, we had to transform the translations into our own poetry, or make the literal translation more “poetic”. Since I’m rather pleased with what I came up with, I thought I’d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,27,6],"tags":[28,12],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-on-the-blog","category-poems-on-the-blog","category-poetry","tag-prompt","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ndraw a veil over my heart,
\nsend a tree’s shadow to cover me,
\nor send your shadow.<\/p>\n
\nthat I’ll grow bat’s wings and take to the sky,
\nthat you will hide in a stranger’s eye
\nwhich will close, lidded by a wormwood leaf.<\/p>\n
\nand fear leaves me, speech leaves me.
\nI take these words and drown them in the sea.
\nNewborn, wordless, I whistle to the moon,
\ntransform it into a crescent of love. <\/p>\n