Found in Translation

It’s often in these Autumn days where life and seasons are changing when I find myself searching for a certain word, and can’t quite find the one with the meaning I want. Though a great word, I’m overusing bittersweet as kids go off to college and the air gets colder. I realize most of the words I’m looking for have to do with emotion. But sometimes they are about color – a shade of blue or orange that is not in my vocabulary, or a state of being, like an accomplishment that is also a loss.

These words, surely, exist – maybe in other languages? It’s one of the great reasons to read translated poetry and prose, and of course, to learn other languages. Reading translations, even if a word is described rather than translated literally, gives us a new window to how people live. This week the Library of Congress announced a new poet laureate – Arthur Sze. A former poet laureate of Santa Fe, he’s known for his poetry of the American Southwest. I was interested to see Sze will focus on poetry in translation. He said this in announcing his new role:

 "As laureate I feel a great responsibility to promote the ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, can impact our daily lives. "We live in such a fast-paced world: poetry helps us slow down, deepen our attention, connect and live more fully."

I’ve been thinking a lot about translation – and translators particularly as they traverse woods on a mission – as I just finished reading “The Extinction of Irena Ray,” by Jennifer Croft. It’s a novel about eight translators in search of an author who has disappeared into a forest. Croft in real life is the translator of the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. In Croft's book, fiction and truth intertwine for a strange mushroom-fueled story of how we understand and misunderstand each other, a wild fever dream of a tale in which language is the constant thread and pull.

– Shannon