Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
What is a translingual poem?
In The Translingual Imagination Steven G. Kellman applies the term “translingualism” to writing in more than one language or a language other than one’s primary one. The translingual author, he states, is “an author whose linguistic medium is a matter of option.” Not surprisingly, he limits himself to novelists, including well-known examples like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett. It appears that a translingual poem, while possible, is not very common — and even then seriously compromised as a poem. I suggest another way of understanding the term “translingualism.” It doesn’t signify writing in more than one language or a language other than one’s primary one. It has nothing to do with switching languages, replacing one language with another for practical reasons.
In The Translingual Imagination Steven G. Kellman applies the term “translingualism” to writing in more than one language or a language other than one’s primary one. The translingual author, he states, is “an author whose linguistic medium is a matter of option.” Not surprisingly, he limits himself to novelists, including well-known examples like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett. As he notes,