Fifth exercise...

was mistranslation--wherein one translates from a source language to a target language without knowing the source language. This one threw people at first. Harry talked about sources and targets, languages and other kinds. He went around the room and asked what languages we knew: French, Italian, Spanish, German, Vietnamese, even Farsi. We looked pretty sheepish when he asked "Didn't anybody study Classics--Latin, Greek?" No. "Good!" Then he handed round a passage from The Iliad in the original. "Take 10 minutes and translate this." You should have seen the faces. I had the advantage of having done this before (in David Lehman's class from a Michaux poem, and also when I read Ashbery has all his students do it), but the time limit seemed impossible.



I thought I would have to scan the original to make this make sense, but I found the original online here. He gave us just the first 15 lines.



Mistranslation from Greek, 10 minutes



Naropa Institute, O our elevated ideas are Nirvana.

[Later, I cut this first line.]



Yep, young ones, all advances are eeked

out this way. Either intentionally, accidentally,

pathetically, or maximally with each turn

of the line. Welcome as you happen. Envoy.

Bon voyage. Oceans away await you.



Anytime we misplace our files, knowing one iota

over everything, we then have leapt out among

eurekas. We then know how any sportive

adolescent manages to tax her maw and paw with lies.



So either take this tantilizing view or

choose not to know. Whatever. Innuendo

excites many but not all. Exit's that way, go

beat a tattoo upon the door.



Either/or or anyhow, expectations are attenuated to the honks

outside, the cabs. The taxis speed with passengers

ever askew. Take me, for example,

I'm pretty charismatic outwardly. But

unexpectedly something of a tough cookie afterall.



Obviously, this was the most interesting result I'd had so far, though strictly speaking, I had no idea what I was talking about, though I did like some of the lines a lot. And certain of the rhythms sounded "like me." Where the heck did this come from? Who was speaking? Did I write this or was it there, somehow, in the source I couldn't read? These are the questions Harry asked us afterwards. He stressed that we wrote these things. Who else could've? But we wrote them from a place apart from our broken-in chair at our familiar desk. (He didn't say it like that, but I like the metaphor.)



Visual similarities between certain Greek letters and our alphabet triggered some of the words. For instance, where I wrote "iota" another student came up with "aorta." Others had "taxes" near where I'd put "taxis," and so on. The first Greek word (which is actually "Nestor"), looked to me like Naropa, and etc.



If you're interested in seeing the English, though it's sort of beside the point, it's here.



After this one, we broke for lunch.