We know much of poetry
Wanders off in translation—
Unique music of a tongue,
Allusions packed into puns,
Strict rhythms magically spun
From colloquialisms,
Fresh meanings suddenly sprung.
What’s left is analogous,
Approximate, flat. That’s that.
Alright. But there’s poetry
In that poetry, fresh gifts
Thanks entirely to losses,
Something that would not have been
Allowed in either language
Were it not for translation.
All the awkward choices made,
Every given sacrifice,
Each exposed exposition
That was graceful and fluid
In the original, now
Laid bare as lakeshore in drought,
All the broken prosodies,
The mutated melodies,
Warping something rich and strange,
Or at least strange, newly strange,
Part of neither tradition,
A poem not quite in the game.
Accumulating changes
Of enough generations
Alone can make translations,
Render the familiar dim,
Make the known mysterious.
Chained-up owls and tortoises
Led to metamorphosis.
We know this was poetry
Because we can’t explain this.
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