Confinement

For my creative piece, I extracted five words from each of the five texts in my anthology. I then arranged them into a poem. The words that I chose all related to my anthology’s theme, confinement.

List of Words

From Nightwood, Djuna Barnes: picture (41), account (54), forever (41), pregnant (49), hesitation (41), image (41), mind (41)

From “To The Reader”, Charles Baudelaire: Boredom, buckram, Devil, torment, spirits, banal, delusion

From “445”, Emily Dickinson: Closet, pound, girl, still, lodged, brain, shut

From “890”, Emily Dickinson: Coffin, restricted, diminish, circumference, without, contain, breadth

From “Reading as Poaching”, Michel de Certeau: Pastures (165), garden (165), system (166), reduction (165), collected (165), caught (165), nets (165)

 

CONFINEMENT

Picture Boredom’s closet: coffin pastures.

Accounting gardens, buckram, pounds, restrictions.

Devil girl’s system, forever diminished.

Circumference, still pregnancy, reducing torment.

Brain caught containing banal images.

Collected spirits lodged without hesitation.

Delusion shuts mind net’s breadth.

 

Sabrina Rodriguez

I believe that the poet is responsible for a poem’s power. As an extension to this, I believe writers are responsible for a written work’s power. Recently, S.E. Hinton received backlash after stating that two of the characters in her famous work, The Outsiders, were not homosexual. People accused her of not being considerate of young people in the LGBTQ+ community who identify with these characters they assumed to be gay, to which her response was “Young gay kids can identify with the book without me saying the characters are gay…I said I did not write the characters that way. I apologize for nothing.”

In the case of Emily Dickinson, who hid her poems and never published any of her work with her name on them while she was alive, I don’t think she would appreciate other people trying to dictate what she meant in her writing. Dickinson was known for using a writing style (and life style) that would set her apart from other writers, and, according to Howe’s commentary, she was “emanicpated from all representations of human order” when she locked herself in her childhood home for the majority of her life. The outside world is not equipped to analyze her poetry and accurately depict what it means which causes the poem to lose some of its power.

Howe goes on to say that “My voice formed from my life belongs to nobody else.” According to this, the reader of poetry actually strips the poet of power once the poem is read.

-Sabrina Rodriguez

On Wednesday,  October 11, Andrew Zawacki read from various books that he has translated and discussed his experience as a translator. Zawacki stated that “the reason to translate people is so you can cannibalize them”. As a translator, Zawacki explained that he was able to take on the role as a second author to the poems because the original author gave him the freedom to translate the work in a way that would express the true meaning of the poems, rather than strictly stick by the technical translation of the words. Translation can be difficult because of the writing techniques that writers use to shape their work. For example, in Zawacki’s case, there were a set of poems whose titles ended in the letter “o” or the “oh” sound. Translating the titles exactly would change this element, so Zawacki had to navigate the problem by creating new titles with the same meaning, shortening titles to have the “oh” sound, or keeping titles entirely. Zawacki explained that writing techniques such as fake etymologies and alliteration are some of the reasons why English is difficult to translate.

I was unaware that translation could be used as a way to not only physically transcribe the words of a work into a different language, but to transform a work in presented slightly different way so that a new audience could understand its meaning accurately. I also didn’t know how collaborative the process of translation was; often I think of translation as a step that happens after authors are dead, which is why I wasn’t aware that approval from the author even takes place. My favorite part of Zawacki’s presentation was how he compared his translation experience as a “reperforming, remixing or sampling” of the book; this explanation debunks many misconceptions about what translation is and how it is used to tackle literature.

-Sabrina Rodriguez

Satire and parody both use exaggeration to reveal flaws in characters, societies, or ideas.Satire often uses irony and exaggeration to convey the shortcomings and deeper issues of a character, event, or society. A contemporary example of satire would be The Colbert Report, a show where the host uses humor to address–often controversial– social or political issues that affect people’s lives. Parody is a form of satire, which is most commonly known as a “spoof”, where an original work is imitated to mock and make fun of characters, situations, and events. An example of a parody would be the movie “Spaceballs”, a spoof of the original Star Wars trilogy, where character’s poor decisions and personal flaws are flaunted in a comical way.

– Sabrina Rodriguez