Heather Green
LESSONS IN TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES:
TRANSLATING THE BOOK OF HIS ZEAL
A TREE STRUCTURE SPLITS INTO TWO OTHERS.
ONCE, A DEVOTEE RAN OUT FROM THE FUSELAGE, THE WINGS AFFIXED
WITH SMALL PIECES OF WIRE.
LESSONS IN TRANSLATION
TECHNIQUES:
the absence of numbers
at the mouth.
These dwellings that
wound near the riverbank –
a knife, scraping
implements, arrowheads,
teeth, and soda-can
pull-tabs
to ward off what grows
when you spit the seed out –
They sew themselves,
paint themselves,
invisible to the naked eye.
The best guess: their
language retreated deep into the jungle,
displayed phonemes and
sharp intakes of breath.
Individual words were
hard to learn.
The words differ only
in pitch: tongues women use than men do.
We struggled of a
grammar –
The Book of halting,
it was just a story, replaced the standard answer.
No memory, no myths,
no myths,
few before the forest,
no fixed words for
colors.
A red cup looks like
blood.
Extract a red
dye.
The first year tutored
herself,
listening
slightly.
The room could be
locked.
The second year
borrowed a boat
from the river soon
before joining him,
the joy beaten to
death.
ThatÕs what you do
for God.
TRANSLATING THE BOOK
OF HIS ZEAL
Tending house,
he found a month,
a year, were hardly
time
to imagine new
numbers:
one, two, and many,
but with an important
difference.
He sat across from
himself and had the match array.
The array consisted of
one at a time.
He asked the subject
whether fewer was right.
It bleeds over.
They donÕt show any of
that:
the century, the
words,
the coterie of world
did not share his
enthusiasm.
A TREE STRUCTURE
SPLITS INTO TWO OTHERS.
ThatÕs a tree
structure,
thoughts inside of
other thoughts
absent from their
syntax,
excoriated,
troubled by
paper.
ItÕs really very
important to know that itÕs a question.
A child at birth would
have no trouble tongue.
They understand how to
catch and avoid,
no tools or weapons,
and out-survive the
acquisition of language.
ONCE, A DEVOTEE RAN
OUT FROM THE FUSELAGE, THE WINGS AFFIXED WITH SMALL PIECES OF WIRE.
Have you met this
man?
Failure, a future, the
boysÕ model airplanes,
the momentary burst
of the sight of an
actual plane.
This was a conundrum
outside of their core grammar.
A never-ending
sentence,
a little too long to
generate unlimited meaning,
calls the infinite finite.
Do not insert thoughts
inside one another down by the river
get bitten by a snake.