Show threadbs2Oct 9, 2023
> John Berger wrote, True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.
> Between the English translation I offered, and the urgency I felt typing ‘Aha Makav in the lines above, is not the point where this story ends or begins.
#JohnBerger #OnTranslation
bs2Oct 9, 2023
> But who is this translation for and will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation? When they have drunk dry my river will they join the mourning procession across our bleached desert?
https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/
#NatalieDiaz #Mojave #BodyWater #BodyRiver #Translation #OnTranslation #Poetry /HT #RebeccaSolnit's FBpost
The First Water Is the Body – Natalie Diaz

“We carry the river, its body of water, in our body.” In a bracing prose poem, Mojave / Akimel O’odham poet Natalie Diaz articulates the continuity between her body and the body of the Colorado River.

Emergence Magazine