meise
meine klinge war einmal
ein holzlöffel
jetzt ist er eine klinge
mein unterarm ist eine klinge
die eindringt & gemächlich verharrt
unter der linken untern rippe
die freie rippe
Adams konsulat
gleich anbei
am löffel kalter
haferschleim
By Octavio Paz
Lovely to be asked by Michael Vidon of the Stephen Spender Prize / Trust to make a video for a new series they’re running, to inspire or provoke new translations, which has me read 3 poems in languages outside of English. I am shamefully monolingual, but did my best at reading a poem of mine, a poem by Thomas Bernhard and a poem by Octavio Paz.
The poem Meise was translated by Konstantin Ames and published by Karawa in Germany. It’s from my book Minimum Security Prison Dentistry.
By Thomas Bernhard
A focus of this project is an exploration of sound, the sonority of the poems. I have long curated events where poets have read in languages other than English, in England, and offered them the choice to read without translations if they wished. This is my preference. For the live experience of the sound over the cognitive pursuit of semantic meaning, which takes from the more ephemeral and bodily listening. As such, I’ve developed a taste for listening to poems I don’t understand, and practise sound poetry a lot myself, where semantics are secondary, often. In this case I chose these poems because I felt I knew their meaning, vaguely, semantically, and I could just about pronounce them, and then I experienced their sound in the reading. There are rivers of writing on the sonority of languages expressing their character but this is of course limited, it all depends on the mouth speaking. And I took this to heart, trying hard not to overpronounce, to have an accent in German or Spanish when I haven’t really earned one. So the sound became very much an English mouth making sounds alien to it. Duller, dumber, than the corresponding sounds I could imagine from the page. The Paz poem has speed I think, faster sound, and the Bernhard more depth. But this is subjective, and the joy of trying to read that which I know I might be deaf to.