Poetry in practice
In the second section of Poetry in Practice we acknowledge the fact that many poets write in what is not their own first language. Here, Carmen Bugan gives practical advice from her own experience – her first language is Romanian. Pey Colborne describes hers in a poem – her first language is Chinese. Other poets in this issue whose first language is not English are Ivy Alvarez (Tagalog), Pascal Petit (French) and Ernesto Sarezale (Spanish and Basque).
The first few months my family and I spent in the United States (as political refugees-immigrants-exiles) were the most difficult and also the most humorous months in my entire life. I was nineteen years old when we made the track across countries, from Romania to a refugee camp in Italy and then to Michigan, via New York Kennedy Airport. No one in my family spoke English and three of us could say a few things in French, which didn’t help matters much. We went around supermarkets with our bilingual dictionaries asking for “flesh” instead of “meat”, for “cow cheese” instead of “cottage cheese” and kept searching for “cow yogurt not sweet”. Often I was hopelessly falling into fantasy spells in the check-out lanes in front of glossy magazines advertising perfume on pages where unbelievably beautiful women and the most handsome men I ever saw lounged next to sky-scrapers’ windows with lazy confidence. I wanted to be fluent, beautiful, persuasive, and I was tongue-tied.
The rich life taking place in my mind clashed with the ‘universe’ of the few mispronounced, misplaced, utterly inappropriate words I learned, creating a circus where our sponsors watched a clown in pain. Every day I asked my ‘American friends’ if I looked American yet, if I sounded American, and every day I repeated the idiom and the slang I heard on TV to the uproar of my audience. After a few months I was hired to work at Burger King and to the shock of the drive-through manager I repeated something a fourteen year old taught me: “Hi. Welcome to Plainfield Burger King: what the hell do you want?” When I was a student in an English 101 course, I told my teacher that I was reading a book called The Patience of the Mind: it was, in fact, Freud’s fictionalized biography The Passion of the Mind I was struggling with - I mispronounced the most important word. I hadn’t lived in the country long enough to hear the language.
I tell this story because it parallels the journey one takes when one begins to write poetry in a second language. Getting the substance across is an act of pronouncing that substance through the diction, syntax, right imagery and sound. One must go and live in the new language for as long as it takes to have dreams in it and longer yet, until the dreams about the landscapes and people from one’s country of origin give way to images of the place where one lives. Poetry which sounds truthful in another language must arise not only from the study of the canonical writers of that new language, but also from the poet’s complete immersion in the place where the language is spoken. After writing for a few years in English, I started having ‘happy accidents’: those were ‘unforced’ matches of words, feelings and thoughts. There was no sense of ‘translating the self’ from Romanian into American English and there was no element of the ‘exotic’. What happened after that was a conscious effort to re-enact, to repeat the accident, the fluency.
Once my grasp of English was good enough that I could ‘feel’ the rising and falling of speech rhythms, I began thinking of how I might best bring my Romanian-ness into the poems, so that I could express the fullness of my experience as someone who lives in two languages. Later yet, I was able to see how poets such as the Russian Joseph Brodsky, for example, could sound like W.H. Auden, and I could also see where he was pure Brodsky in English. I could also hear accents and I could appreciate ‘poetic language’ as something entirely different from ‘spoken language’: at the beginning, everything was poetry to me. But this happened long after the clown in the supermarket check-out lane got yelled at for getting glued to the magazine stand where, for what seemed an eternity to the cranky shoppers, she was Diana hoping to catch the heart of an Actaeon in suit and tie. And it is a longer road still to truly apprehending the import of that ‘creative misprision’ between the ‘passion’ and the ‘patience’ of the mind. (The term was just explained to me by my supervisor at Oxford.) In Romania we say that what you plan on buying from the market is almost never what you end up bringing home: I can only encourage keeping one’s sense of humor during the unpacking of the bags in front of an expectant
audience.
The first few months my family and I spent in the United States (as political refugees-immigrants-exiles) were the most difficult and also the most humorous months in my entire life. I was nineteen years old when we made the track across countries, from Romania to a refugee camp in Italy and then to Michigan, via New York Kennedy Airport. No one in my family spoke English and three of us could say a few things in French, which didn’t help matters much. We went around supermarkets with our bilingual dictionaries asking for “flesh” instead of “meat”, for “cow cheese” instead of “cottage cheese” and kept searching for “cow yogurt not sweet”. Often I was hopelessly falling into fantasy spells in the check-out lanes in front of glossy magazines advertising perfume on pages where unbelievably beautiful women and the most handsome men I ever saw lounged next to sky-scrapers’ windows with lazy confidence. I wanted to be fluent, beautiful, persuasive, and I was tongue-tied.
The rich life taking place in my mind clashed with the ‘universe’ of the few mispronounced, misplaced, utterly inappropriate words I learned, creating a circus where our sponsors watched a clown in pain. Every day I asked my ‘American friends’ if I looked American yet, if I sounded American, and every day I repeated the idiom and the slang I heard on TV to the uproar of my audience. After a few months I was hired to work at Burger King and to the shock of the drive-through manager I repeated something a fourteen year old taught me: “Hi. Welcome to Plainfield Burger King: what the hell do you want?” When I was a student in an English 101 course, I told my teacher that I was reading a book called The Patience of the Mind: it was, in fact, Freud’s fictionalized biography The Passion of the Mind I was struggling with - I mispronounced the most important word. I hadn’t lived in the country long enough to hear the language.
I tell this story because it parallels the journey one takes when one begins to write poetry in a second language. Getting the substance across is an act of pronouncing that substance through the diction, syntax, right imagery and sound. One must go and live in the new language for as long as it takes to have dreams in it and longer yet, until the dreams about the landscapes and people from one’s country of origin give way to images of the place where one lives. Poetry which sounds truthful in another language must arise not only from the study of the canonical writers of that new language, but also from the poet’s complete immersion in the place where the language is spoken. After writing for a few years in English, I started having ‘happy accidents’: those were ‘unforced’ matches of words, feelings and thoughts. There was no sense of ‘translating the self’ from Romanian into American English and there was no element of the ‘exotic’. What happened after that was a conscious effort to re-enact, to repeat the accident, the fluency.
Once my grasp of English was good enough that I could ‘feel’ the rising and falling of speech rhythms, I began thinking of how I might best bring my Romanian-ness into the poems, so that I could express the fullness of my experience as someone who lives in two languages. Later yet, I was able to see how poets such as the Russian Joseph Brodsky, for example, could sound like W.H. Auden, and I could also see where he was pure Brodsky in English. I could also hear accents and I could appreciate ‘poetic language’ as something entirely different from ‘spoken language’: at the beginning, everything was poetry to me. But this happened long after the clown in the supermarket check-out lane got yelled at for getting glued to the magazine stand where, for what seemed an eternity to the cranky shoppers, she was Diana hoping to catch the heart of an Actaeon in suit and tie. And it is a longer road still to truly apprehending the import of that ‘creative misprision’ between the ‘passion’ and the ‘patience’ of the mind. (The term was just explained to me by my supervisor at Oxford.) In Romania we say that what you plan on buying from the market is almost never what you end up bringing home: I can only encourage keeping one’s sense of humor during the unpacking of the bags in front of an expectant
audience.
Page(s) 48-49
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