Tag: Google Translate

NPM Day Twenty: Lost & Gained in Translation

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Lost and Gained in Translation:
Take a short poem you’ve written. Open Google Translate. Copy and paste your poem into the translator. Turn it into French, or Urdu, or Javanese, and back again. What happened to it? What startles you? Copy out the phrases and combinations you like. Try it again. The final poem could be anything.

I sent my Science poem from yesterday through quite a number of translation transformations. At one point, science became elm, then alarm, then bell, and finally, depression. The mouse became a moth and a beetle and a butterfly and a bill. It began to sound so much like someone was telling my fortune that I kept the five phrases pretty much intact as I went.

Depression: The Bell
(Telling Your Fortune)

Be quiet like a moth walking on a fence.
The model is simple, but the money is hard,
Because of the large number of central bodies.
Look closely at all the evidence.
Purify your heart with reverence.

The original, for Reference:

Science

Silent as a mouse creeping along a fence,
Simple the patterns, but intricate the sense,
Since what’s in the center is often intense,
Sift carefully through all the evidence,
Silt washes away, leaving behind reverence.

Gratitude List:
1. Trusting my instincts
2. Clear, fresh, sweet water
3. That titmouse calling out in the dawn, insisting on his place in the world
4. I’m mostly sleeping through the night again
5. Memory

May we walk in Beauty!

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” —Louise Erdrich

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
―Ursula K. Le Guin

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ―Claude Monet

“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” ―Malala Yousafzai

I called through your door,
“The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!”
“Leave me alone. I’m sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here,
and he wants to resurrect somebody!”
―Jalaludin Rumi (trans. by Barks)

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
―Jalaluddin Rumi (trans. by Barks)

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
―Anaïs Nin

“Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.”
―Haruki Murakami

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” —Richard Rohr

Gained In Translation, Again

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Uncategorized

Three years ago, I ran a couple of my short poems through Google Translate to see what would happen. From English to Pashto and back again. From English to Pashto to Hindi to Javanese and back again. How does meaning become fractured through the algorithmic translation process? Last week, I tried it again. I started with:

Long have I longed for
and dreaded
this moment
of darkness,
belonging to silence,
sure of my shadows.

Then I ran it through
Sinhala —> Tajik —> Swahili —> Malayalam —> Pashto —> back to English

Here is what happened. Look how it pulled a rhyme in there for me (afraid/shade), and the meaning has definitely shifted, but I’m really happy with it. I added punctuation at the end for clarification. I actually like it better than my original.
I’ve been waiting a long time.
Don’t be afraid.
At this point:
Dark,
In silence,
I believe in shade.

Then I tried Mr. McConnell’s famous Truth: Nevertheless she persisted.
Ran it through Punjabi —> Bangla —> Hmong —> Kyrgyz —> Tamil —> English
Ended up with: The reality is, however, there is more.
This changes the meaning a little more than I really want to, but it is an interesting end.

I tried a third, another of my tiny poems. This time, that fifth line changed anger to sex. Hmmm.
Take a deep breath.
Find the place inside you
that remembers how truth feels;
remember that there
are kinds of anger
that are more effective
than blind outrage.

Tamil —> Javanese —> Cebuano —> Hindi —> Kazakh —> English

Take a deep breath.
Find a place in your stomach
The cruelty of truth is considered;
Remember
Sex is scary
It was very effective
Especially the blind.

Ah, well. I like putting the essence of meaning outside of my control for a moment and seeing what happens.

In Creative Writing classes, many of the exercises I have students do are to encourage us to move behind that space in our brain that controls the meanings. Part of the reason for this is that is helps us to discover hidden wells and springs of words and ideas within ourselves that we didn’t know were there, like finding the secret room in your house in the dream. At a basic level, it helps us learn that there are a thousand ways to say a thing, a thousand hues of meaning. Giving up control in the immediate moment, as with an exercise like this, helps us learn to take control, to refine and define our meanings.

Gratitude List:
1. Singing in the pit for our school’s musical. It’s a rather big commitment, but I love it.
2. Yesterday after I dropped a Big Boy off for tech prep for the play, I had a couple hours just to be by myself. I went shopping, of all things. Hit the Goodwill pay-by-the-pound bins, and A.C. Moore’s going out of business sale. I bought Small Boy a stack of canvases for painting–half price.
3. The Small Boy hasn’t painted for months, but at the moment he is creating a marvelous abstract cloud-like scene with watercolors. Hmm. Now he is adding some acrylics on top of that. Experiment, Kid!
4. Silver hair. When I see photos of myself now, my first awareness is of a middle-aged, grey-haired, gnome-like woman. I’m okay with that. No, I’m actually happy with that. I like being middle-aged, and I like having unicorn hair.
5. The way the sun casts shadows in the bosque across the road when it slides up and over the opposite ridge in the mornings. All those tree-shadows!

May we walk in Beauty!

I Am Not Alone and Hearts Glowing Fire

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

hildegard1
This is one of my favorite views of the ruins of Disibodenberg, the abbey where Hildegard was brought as a girl. I ran it through a Mosaic filter on the Dreamscope app.

This is a poem I wrote several years ago. I am in the process of deciding whether there’s an essential wisdom to the poem that warrants revision and inclusion in my next book. Meanwhile, Google Translate and I are having a little fun with it. The stanzas in parentheses happened after I sent them through several languages in Google Translate.

Now I realize
that I must fling myself
into the center of my life
with a fierce intensity
and passionate joy
or risk dissipation.

(I was the center of my life,
and the joy and the pride
or the threat of violence,
I know the voice cast.)

And all while holding the center,
embodying the nature of the tree.
This, too, helps to hold it all together.

(Always occupied the center of the tree.
In addition, all to get together.)

That still small place
cannot exist for me
without the passion that feeds it.
Nor can I maintain the fire
without the quiet and glowing core.

(A small part of this feed
is not available to me without passion.
I am not alone and hearts glowing fire.)

Somehow, “nor can I maintain the fire” became “I am not alone.” I wonder how I can draw parallels between such thoughts. The tense shifts in the first stanza open up some interesting connections, too. Everything has layers of meaning. Does my friend Google Translate help me to elucidate or obfuscate my deeper meanings?

Gratitude List:
1. A day of solitude.  The boys have gone to Diggerland for the day.
2. Coffee, socks, and a hat on a chilly day
3. My new fountain pen. The ink came yesterday, and I just want to write and write and write. I will use it for today’s grading. I am thinking of giving it a name: Kalamu, or Chemchemi, perhaps. (Pen and Fountain, respectively, in Kiswahili.)
4. Crows and blue jays. Messengers.
5. Toast and peanut butter.

May we walk in Beauty!