Here's another attempt at re-translation, from Jen Hofer's anthology. The original poem is by Ana Belén López

Dibuja una letra
la borra el mar
dibuja otra letra
la vuelve a borrar el mar
borra el mar
aparecen las letras
sólo queda solo el mar

Here's the translation in the book:

Traces a letter
the sea erases it
traces another letter
the sea erases it again
the sea erases
the letters appear
erases the letters
alone remains the sea alone

Here is my first try, based on two or three main divergences from Hofer: I interpret the verb forms as imperatives; I think the subject and object are reversed in one of the lines; I think it is noteworthy that every line of the original ends with either "mar" or "letra[s]".

Draw a letter
erased by the sea
draw another letter
erased again by the sea
erase the sea
to reveal the letters
erase the letters
leaving alone only the sea

A third try: I retain the third person interpretation of the verbs, and try to write a version in which the translation "explains" the poem. I invent a nonce subject "she" for the third person verbs, which the original (wisely) leaves out:

She traces a letter
the sea blots it out
she traces another letter
the sea returns to blot it out
she blots out the sea
the letters appear
only the sea is left alone

There could be other versions combining features of these three. Reading a translation like this involves for me a constant process of re-translation. I want to explore possibilities that the translator has not.

My 2nd graders surprised me today, on the last day of the poetry workshop, with an acrostic, a class collaboration in about twenty different handwritings:

Joyful, juggles
Optimistic
Nice, new
Awesome, amazing
Terrific, tremendous
Happy, helpful
Active, appealing
Neat, noticeable

Magnificent, marvelous
Applaud, artistic
Yes!, youthful
Humorous, heart
Excellent, eccentric
Wow, willing

That was a very nice thing to do, I thought.

***

When I said, "imagine W.C.W. writing sonnet after sonnet," I was aware of his Keatsian beginnings. What I meant to say was imagine the modernist WCW writing mostly in the sonnet form, making the sonnet modernist. I agree also that the later Williams is (with notable exceptions) a let-down. His best period is in the 1920s and 1930s. How ironical that when he claimed to have discovered his "variable foot" was when his free verse was going slack. He was almost 40 before he really discovered his true style; there's still to much didactic posturing in Al que quiere. Let me tell you how to conduct a funeral! Listen up townspeople!

My lecture for Spain is almost complete. I end with Concha García. I do mention blogs as a phenomenon, part of the effort to write the continuous present. The influence of Samuel Pepys on Jordan Davis. Quite erudite.

Why do I get so peevish about things of no importance?

My aunt Lenore Mayhew sent me a copy of the Atlanta Review. She has a poem in there, and there is also a desultory selection of poetry from contemporary Spain. Imagine if someone purported to represent American poetry, in a foreign language, with a few poems by Daniel Hoffman or Maxine Kumin, John Ashbery's one-hundredth best poem, and one poem by an American professor of English living in Spain who is unknown in the U.S. Accompany it with an essay evoking a few common stereotypes about the United States. Don't include any of the original English either; the translation is sufficient.

I can't imagine what anybody could get out of such a meager and arbitrary selection. It just increases my annoyance at translators in general. Jen Hofer at least writes an introduction (to her book "Sin puertas visibles") in which no generalizations are proffered: she doesn't offer any claims that can be questioned, she simply leaves room for the poetry to do its work. I also like the fact she gives the Spanish text priority, reversing the usual arrangement in bilingual editions.

See Gary's defense of blogging and the Pillow Book.

I don't think more "serious" venues for critique actually produce more useful criticism than the dialogues going on among/between the blogs. I certainly learn more than I would an hour in the periodical room with learned journals.

At school I tried to show Julia's teacher Julia's blog, but the school's internet filter sternly blocked our way. I did tell her about T&W though.

The last day of teaching 2nd grade. We did "dream poems." Julia got up early and wrote another acrostic, for her teacher. The one she wrote on my name yesterday is hilarious. She'll probably post it later today. She flips through her Scholastic Dictionary, finds a word she doesn't know, and writes a line beginning with it. Since often times the word has a negative charge to it, she flips it around into a positive, like "arsenic is something I stay away from." The result is a weird negative logic.

***

I am finding myself going back to delete material, such as a commentary on Gabe Gudding that used to be here. Unless you checked the blog in the past few hours you missed it.

Do I need to explain that Juje used a dictionary to write this acrostic? Arduous and eczema are not in her everyday vocabulary.

From Catherine:

I love the blog page loading

slowly

toward the sheet music

of Thelonious

Monk liked working within forms, not exploding them. Especially the 12-bar blues. Imagine if William Carlos Williams had written sonnet after sonnet. I am not the first to make this observation. The renaming of this blog inevitably affects its content.

I like the irregular, aleatory quality of "discussions" among bloggers. The way something I say may or may not be picked up for discussion--and in unpredictable ways. The fact no two bloggers have the same set of links or read the exact same set of blogs on the same schedule. I don't have a complete set of links on my sites, for example. I don't have a link to Drew Gardner's overlap, even though I read his blog. There is no reason for this; I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

So any attempt to plot the path of discussion in an orderly way is doomed to failure--and it's a good thing too. All this in reaction to an article that many have been discussing, in chaotic fashion, after Joe Duemer put a link up there sometime in the past 36 hours. I found the link on equanimity but I'm sure it's available elsewhere as well.

I'm not strong in harmony, but "Bemsha Swing" seems to have a lot of chord shifts that go down one half step chromatically, like Ami7 to AbMA7, Db7 to CMA7, Eb7 to D7. (I found the chord progressions on the internet, along with the transcription pasted in below.) The harmony seems quite complex--in relation to a fairly simple, catchy melody. I want my blog to be like that. . .

Herb kindly emailed me with explanation of Bemsha and binnacle, but I cannot open the email for some reason. I am working this summer with a web-based email program that is not wholly reliable. A "binnacle" is a cylindrical case for a compass on a ship.

The melody is breathtakingly simple: a fourth jump from G to C (the tonic), a little run back down to C an octave lower. C, B flat, A Flat, G, F, E, [B], C. This is repeated a second time, then transposed a fourth up, so that you jump from C to F, and repeat the same melody in the key of F. Then back to the beginning again. A condensed AABA form: 16 measures in total, not counting the 8 bar introduction.

***

Julia wrote several poems last night. She could barely contain her excitement about the fact that I am teaching in her school again this week.

To inaugurate the official name change I offer this rendering of "Bemsha Swing."