Tape recorder

 I extended the method a bit by improvising into the tape recorder, just talking out loud for 10 minutes. I can use that tomorrow to begin writing. By "tape recorder" I mean phone, in the voice memo app. Knowing me, I won't even listen to it, but just try to remember what I said. Same difference. Knowing the recording is there is enough.  My speech is halting, not at all fluent. All the better. 

Improvisation is how we have conversations in real life. We don't script them because we don't know what the other person will say and there will always be uncertainty.  

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I came up with this idea for an article on translation as the poet's workshop.  I'm sure others have thought of this but here it is:

Translating is the best way of becoming a poet, or working on one's poetic acumen. 

The history of translation bears this out. The history of translation is not an insistence on the translator's "invisibility," as Venuti argues.  

In the first place, there is a close reading of the original text in all its dimensions. Prosodical, semantic, aesthetic, cultural. Every word of the text is relevant, even the and and. In some sense those little function words are crucial, as Ron Padgett says.  

Secondly, there is the composition of a new text, where the poet practices writing poetry. Once again, with all the dimensions of poetic craft.  

Thirdly, there is a reflection on the relation between A and B, the reading part of translation and the writing part. 

It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks the translation is bad or good, from the perspective of this workshopping mentality.  The learning takes place no matter what because the end product is not the poem, but the poet. Seemingly bad results are more interesting. Why did they occur? If you can figure out why, then there is probably something to reflect on.  

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Chinese poetry has highly developed prosodic rules. It is constrained worse than Mallarmé or Oulipo. Translation of Chinese poetry into English is almost free verse, and the image is supreme. Logopeia, which may or may not be present, depending on the poet, is effaced in translation itself.  So we get Charles Simic effect: no musicality, no attention to language, only the image or metaphor. 

Free verse works in two contradictory ways: it is a technical innovation, and highly crafted... or else it is simply prose broken into lines. Few readers are confident enough to reach judgment, because the translator's free verse is unlikely to be like that of Ezra Pound's, but cannot be dismissed either, because the translator might be thinking about sound, or not as the case might be. 

Contemporary readers cannot tolerate translations into metrical verse or rhyme. Yet that was standard practice for centuries. Venuti treats that as the same as free verse translation: an emphasis on fluency and transparency.