Thursday, October 9, 2008

Traduire Ceci; Übersetzen Sie Dies; Tradurre Questo; Vertaal Dit

If you don't know me that well...Hi. My name is Sara Davidson and I can not write poetry. I feel like i'm part of some unauthorized support group of people who have no idea how to start and form poetry, fumbling about placing words on a page hoping that readers will call it "unique." So, when the assignment for our class was to read and find poetry prompts, I was excited. As I began to read though, some of the poetry prompts made it seem like you have to already know what you're doing before you can use the prompt. When I was reading Robin Reagly's Blog, I realized that I would have to already know how to form and construct a poem in order to use one of those prompts. I did search around though, and I found a blog by Charles Bernstein who gave the most amusing poetry prompt I think I have ever come across. The prompt was this: "Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not neccessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English." It is number 3 in this blog: Charles Bernstein. I thought this was absolutely amazing and the most unique way to make poetry. I am excited to try it now!

I actually thought this poetry prompt was funny because I had just been thinking about this idea to translate a foreign poem or song into english becuase my friend had showed me a link on youtube about somebody doing the same exact thing to an Indian song. I thought it was amusing. Enjoy!
Benny Lava

1 comment:

A Quinlan said...

I'd love to see you try the translation--Charles is hilarious and smart. Most importantly, keep posting....