Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Sleight of brain

When I was working on my dissertation, I found that I could not easily turn off the dissertating mode when I left the computer, and it was draining my energy and fuzzying my focus. So I started a kind of strange therapy in the evenings, after the diss work was done: translation. For me, translation distracts the brain, provides it with the illusion that it's not WORKING--because, you know, what to say is already all figured out for you, and you're left just playing--with language, with the pleasurable surfaces and sounds and echoes of words themselves. It's almost like a magic trick for me: make the brain look OVER THERE, and it won't realize what's going on here, and it doesn't get so fatigued. Translation provides, perhaps surprisingly, a kind of respite. A kind of quiet.

So I've re-started a translation project that got back-burnered for a while, during the crush of teaching and finishing some other tasks that needed attention. And I have to say, it's so much fun. It's like doing a crossword puzzle, a little. Except that it has the added benefit of getting me (re-)excited about the delightful, unexpected, vertiginous, corporeal textures of words, both as a writer and as a reader.

4 comments:

Lisa B. said...

fun. also: how awesome that you have this ability--these languages to be at home in.

Anonymous said...

Ooh, me too! I'm not a poet and don't translate poetry AS poetry, but I absolutely love doing the translations of the non-English passages I quote in my scholarly work. I've relatively recently learned another new language because my research took a sort of unexpected turn (not trying to brag--such is the life of a medievalist who does interdisciplinary work), and I have great fun trying to make translations "feel" right as well as trying to make them grammatically correct etc. in a language that is still less familiar to me than my "regular" foreign languages.

Lexy and Jared said...

You're the coolest person I know. The end.

Ink said...

That is REALLY cool.