Poetry IS a foreign language!
Have you noticed how foreigners and children often say oddly poetic things?
Sometimes those things have a poetic feel because they're grammatical or lexically either wrong or somehow just not quite right ... words and phrases not quite right in a way that an adult native speaker of the language would be unlikley to achieve (You'll see, as we go on, I think it's fair to regard these 'mistakes' as 'achievements' because they are efforts to enter a language from the outside. They represent a kind of progress towards fluency and they also helpfully upset the applecart on everyday expression).
The poetic value of these childish or foreignish ways with the language (heffalump, this much clock?) is easy to discount along thelines of 'they don't know enough of the language to know what they're doing' ... in other words what seems poetic in what they've said, to the poetically trained native ear is just a happy accident ...
Well, I think the happy accidents of language can be the poet's friend...
But what if it's not right that they're merely happy accidents? What if these genuine attempts at meaning, made with the available resources, were really meaningful, in novel ways? What if the reasons children and foreigners to a language are able to - let's say 'natively' - be 'poetic' is that they're not constrained by all of the patterns that constrain those who have lived their lives in that particular idiom. What if foreigners (likewise children) are inventing their way into the language, in a way that poets might usefully take note of?
And why - in any case - should we be condescending towards those who are making the effort to join us as speakers of our language? Rather, we poets should be learning from them!
Don't get me started on the arrogance of English native speakers.
'Natural' language (as opposed to machine or invented language) is a hugely repetitive operation, laden with cliche and the feeling we've all been here before. In another parlance, its outcomes (in the words that come out of our mouths or appear on paper or the screen) are massively 'overdetermined'. That's something poetry - as pared and spare language - actively fights. Perhaps it ought to be true of all literary art, but surely, in the case of poetry, we are really are making the effort to not say things more than once, to not use more words than are necessary!
Then what if the native speakers of a language - have - among other things - a kind of brick wall in our heads? ... one that's been built through schooling and conversation and our experience of the world through the vehicle of that language?... Or a better metaphor might be tight guard rails...
and what if the people coming into the language don't have that brick wall, don't have those guard rails ... what if they're simply a lot more free? And that freedom -- ironically perhaps -- is a freedom with the words of our language? What if foreigners therefore have a lot to teach poets about how to play fast and loose with the English language, and so cook up, if not actual poems, at least the raw material for them?
SO -- then this can be a model for us! Let's make poetry a foreign language. Let's come to it with the spirit of enquiry and experiment a non-native has to have in order to get anywhere.
Consider. The non-native speaker has a headstart on the rest of us ... those of us who have been here in the language all along. Simply by being less au fait with the rules, the disadvantages foreigners to a language suffer as general users of the language may be advantages from the point of view of experimentation and innovation -- from the point of view of getting language to bravely go where it hasn't been before.
Think back to the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century whom I mentioned in the last post. Their aim was to de-automatize, to de-familiarize language, and so make it new, and so show the reader/listener a new world, or a world of new possibilities. Since the advent of modernisms (and so it is also with postmodernisms... so let's say for more than the last century, in European languages particularly) a key role for poetry has been to work at the cutting edge of language - to make new kinds of meaning and to make meaning in ways that have not been tried before.
So let me sum up the foregoing this way -- the non-speaker of a language has this particular advantage in poetry - that s/he cannot help but do to the language what the poet is trying to do with the language! To make things new, to make words new again! Perhaps along the way to make new worlds!
If you grew up with a parent who was not a native speaker of English, then you've probably actually experienced some of this dynamic in action! You might not have noticed at the time, but it may nevertheless be helping you on your journey in poetry.
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Another language is another way of knowing the world ... or a way of knowing another world ... or a bit of both.
How deep does that go? That's another way of asking -- how far can we get into another culture without the language of that other culture?
Check out Manchan Magan's Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manch%C3%A1n_Magan
Think of the fabled many Inuit words for snow.
Every language has 'untranslatable words' ... or at least words that pose a serious problem for a translator, and that will probably require an explanation (rather than just a word) in another language. In a sense, that is the point of another language, of a language being different from the rest. It expresses what is unique to its context, and so what is uniquely necessary to its native speakers.
An exercise.
Hereare some lists of so-called 'untranslatable words'. (There are many such lists on the internet.)
Pick one word. research it. Write a poem with what you find. It could be in the form of a riddle (perhaps an unguessable riddle!). But it needn't be. What it should be though is the attempt to translate -- to make sense of -- a corner of another language, in your own. Such efforts may be ultimately doomed. But they can still be fun, and possibly even important!
https://www.theintrepidguide.com/untranslatable-words-ultimate-list/
https://www.rocketlanguages.com/blog/20-of-the-worlds-most-beautiful-untranslatable-words?srsltid=AfmBOopgEYqSQXBvuPeW_nXR9P741FEryz_WfL9UoHIFDJcyc-68iwss
https://medium.com/swap-language/28-words-that-dont-exist-in-english-you-ll-wish-they-did-e200ef1c3ae2
https://www.reddit.com/answers/4e36ec5f-9e8b-4fbd-a130-74b66f023e0d/?q=List%20of%20beautiful%20untranslatable%20words&source=PDP
| Frustfressen | Excessive eating because of frustration | German | food adverse habits | |
| Kos | Cosiness, warmth, intimacy; kose as a verb; koselig as an adjective. | Norwegian | attribute | |
| Kintsukuroi | To repair with gold. Understanding that a piece is more beautiful for having broken. | Japanese | beauty change | |
| Lekker | Literal translation "tasty", but can be used to describe anything that has one's hearty approval | Afrikaans | positive attribute | |
| Commuovere | "Heartwarming,” but specifically refers to a story that moved you to tears | Italian | beauty interaction emotion | |
| Jein | Yes and no | German | attribute measurement | |
| Muskelkater | Charley horse ("muscle cat") | German | physical | |
| Surströmmingspremier | The first day of the year where it acceptable eat rotten herring. | Swedish | food event |
and let me add
gambatte!
(that's what I wish you on this journey!)
Think of Wittgenstein. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. Or look at that another way. Every language is, perhaps by definition, adequate to the context of its users. It contains and enables what the speakers and listeners need to communicate in their world. I realize that this is a circular argument.
Another language takes you into another world. I think that's a very useful place for a poet to be to go to find her/his-self and what s/he needs to say.
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In the last post in this series, I wrote about the value to poetic production of being a beginner ... being a beginner at almost anything.
In this post, I'd like you to consider the benefits that may come to you - in your English language writing - from being a beginner in another language... in ANY other language! Of course, I think it's great if you can try to write poetry in that other language. (I'd encourage you to go to Esperanto if you don't know where to go, simply because it's the easiest). But writing poetry in a new language is a tall order when you're a beginner. Another thing to try is self-translation. And the combination of self-translation and back translation. That is translate yourself into another language then translate back from that language into English. Rather than spend your life in dictionaries, grammars and clssrooms, you can 'cheat' by using a tool like google translate to do this. Please do not think I am unequivocally singing the virtues of machine translation. But it certainly has its uses! It is probably the easiest and cheapest path to defamilarization. LSD or psilocybin could be alternatives.
Using a tool like google translate, you can translate through a number of languages and see what happens to your original thoughts. You're very unlikely to think that the result of that exericise is, in its own right, a poem you want to keep. Though sometimes we get lucky! It's more likely that you'll discover some interesting things about what you were first hoping to mean, and that might be a helpful influence in your revision process. And/or it might spin out a new poem (or poems) altogether. You might want to take a reflexive turn there, and write about what you're doing - about poetry making, about language and translation.
Translation is and has traditionally been a really important training and proving ground for poets.
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I love Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem 'Jabberwocky' - the most famous nonsense poem ever! In fact I've recently coedited a book of translations (and essays about those translations in forty something languages). You can find it here --
https://books.mau.se/catalog/book/264
Actually each essay in the book is downloadable as a separate pdf... so it's easy to explore
And here is the poem itself
Jabberwocky
