Sentences have always haunted me.  Diagramming them in grammar school (as we still called it).  Parsing.  Their shapes.  The bones of meaningfulness on which scraps of flesh or silks might drape for a moment.  And when they’re gone, the framework is still there.  The armature.

The skeleton at the feast of meaning, of love.  The barebones, structures, structure itself.  Articulate.  Articulated skeleton of medical student: wired, wired to move as a body could.

Words strung lightly on a sense of form.  Threads is my fealty to the tyranny of the sentence.

This link leads to a printable pdf file.

THREADS

In 2002 I was asked to contribute to Alec Finlay’s edition of translations
by several hands of Paul Celan’s poem “Irisch.” While working on my
translation (which duly appeared in the second volume, Irish (2),
Edinburgh 2002), I began to work on other dimensions of the poem,
then of other Celan poems. The present homeophonic translations are
one result. By homeophonic translation I mean: listening to the sound
of the [in this case German] poem until you can hear it as English – the
result, the poem heard, no doubt ‘says’ a ‘different’ thing from the
‘original.’ Those quoted words are all questionable, more question than
answer, I mean. So here are some of my hearings of Celan poems. They
are, in effect, translations into Earish.
A reference in italics at the foot of the page identifies the book
in which appears the German original text here heard heading
towards English:
at = Atemwende
f = Fadensonnen
licht = Lichtzwang
schn = Schneepart
zeit = Zeitgehöft

This link leads to a printable pdf file.

EARISH

In 1602, a ship full of English adventurers and would-be colonists dropped
anchor off the west end of the island. Seven miles across an ocean sound
they spied haughty chalk cliffs that reminded them of Dover. But here the
harbor was snug. They came ashore and spent the winter. Next spring they
went back to England and for one reason or another did not come again. (So
it was not till several years later with the better-known but more
mysteriously fated settlement at Jimson that the English tried again on the
continent.) The leader of the expedition to our island, Mr. Bartholomew
Gosnold, was an actor and adventurer, a colleague of Mr. Shakespeare, to
whom in the spring of 1603 he imparted news of the island, its wealth, its
shimmering illusions, its magic.

This link leads to a printable pdf file.

SAINTE-TERRE