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Essay:

Learning to not push the river when writing poetry, because poetry chooses its own idiom and style.

Yesterday I said:

“I wish to find the best idioms and styles for what I wish to write.”

But now I wonder whether I am arriving at something subtler.

Perhaps it is not:

I choose the language for the poem.

Perhaps it is:

The poem tells me which language it wishes to inhabit.

Those sound similar.

But are profoundly different.

The first treats language as a decision.

The second treats language as discovery.

George Steiner spent much of his life asking what is gained and lost in translation. Milan Kundera wrote passionately about how novels change when they cross languages. Seamus Heaney inhabited English while listening deeply to the cadences of Irish. None of them, however, quite asked the question:

What if languages are not merely different ways of saying the same thing, but different ways of discovering what there is to say?

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How does a poem choose its own language?

I am mostly interested in fitness. That means discovering the right language for the right thought.

I’d venture a thesis:

Languages are not interchangeable containers for ideas. They are different instruments, each capable of revealing some truths more naturally than others.

Notice the word revealing. Not expressing. The language is not a vessel into which you pour an already finished poem. The language participates in the making of the poem.

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A possible framework: 

When a Poem Chooses Its Language

1. Translation is not the beginning.

A confession, and an observation: 

I used to think I wrote poems and then translated them.
Gradually, I discovered that some poems resisted translation; not because the words were difficult, but because the thinking itself belonged to another language.

II. Every language has its own gravity.

Languages are landscapes.

Others prefer to say tools or lenses.

I’d like to alter both metaphors in thinking that a landscape changes the way you walk.

English encourages stride.

French encourages balance.

German architecture.

Spanish gesture.

Nynorsk listening.

These are not absolute truths, but rather poetic tendencies.

III. Vocabulary is the least interesting difference.

Vocabulary is where many translation books begin. I wish to begin where they end.

The important differences are not words. They are habits of attention.

Ask:

What does this language notice?

What does it ignore?

What kinds of silence are natural here?

IV. Verbs reveal a civilisation.

Look at your intended verbs, and compare them across languages.

Not philologically, but poetically.

What kinds of verbs dominate in English?

Italian?

Nynorsk?

French?

Spanish?

Portuguese?

What does that tell us about the kinds of poems they naturally invite?

V. A poem is an ecosystem.

A metaphor lives differently depending on its neighbours.

A river inside Norwegian poetry meets mountains.

A river inside Dutch poetry meets trade.

A river inside Arabic poetry meets the desert.

The same noun.

Different imagination.

VI. Some ideas have a mother tongue.

Not because they cannot be translated. But rather because another language may think them first.

My recent poem about «maintenance» belongs to Nynorsk.

Not because English lacks vocabulary. But rather because Nynorsk already contains a culture of tending.

That’s different.

In that same poetry sequence in Nynorsk:

The title is «Det som held.»

In English, the obvious translation is What Holds. It’s perfectly correct.

But held is richer than holds. It means to hold together, to endure, to sustain, to keep faith, to restrain, to preserve, to remain true. It has gravity.

Similarly, å bere is never merely to carry. It can mean carrying a child, bearing grief, bearing responsibility, enduring pain, yielding fruit, even having significance. English needs a different word for each of those. Nynorsk lets them echo one another.

That echo is poetry.

VII. Translation is hospitality.

Not conquest.

Not ownership.

Hospitality.

You invite a guest into another house.

Some furniture must move.

Some windows remain.

The guest should feel at home.

But still recognisable.

VIII. The greatest translation may be silence.

Sometimes the highest respect for a poem is not translating it.

Or delaying translation.

Or allowing readers to meet the original first.

That is a radical idea in an age that expects immediate accessibility.

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Conclusion:

These new thoughts will demand new approaches and processes, and a better command of vocabulary in the respective languages. 

— Adam Donaldson Powell