lenten journal: the imagination of language

I was catching up on my

tonight and found yesterday was the shared birthday of Billy Collins and Edith Grossman. Billy Collins was the US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and holds the distinction of being a poet who actually sells books. Edith Grossman is a book translator, known best for her translations of Gabriel Garcia Marques’ books and what is for many the definitive translation of

. Born five years apart, they share this day, as well as the ability to make language come alive for us, the readers.

Grossman describes her vocation in this way:

Thinking up characters and plot is not a problem translators have to face, but the imagination of language and how one says what one needs to say in the best way possible—the most effective way possible—that’s a problem that translators have to deal with constantly.

Collins demonstrates the imagination of language brilliantly also, in his own way. Here is his poem, “Litany,” which he said came about because he "stole," as he said, the opening two lines from another poem that needed to be improved. (He also said it with a rather wry smile on his face.)

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine . . .
                 Jacques Crickillon

One of my favorite books on preaching is Walter Brueggemann’s

. Just the title kills me: poetry as a daring use of words. Perhaps he could write a sequel called

, since both are working to find the

, the right word to say it best.

Spending most of my day in a bilingual kitchen where most of us know only a few words of the others’ language, I have a growing appreciation for what it would feel like to hear Abel or Tony speak and then actually to be able to know the right English words to choose to articulate what they said in Spanish. In real life, I’m the culinary equivalent of a hunt-and-peck typist, hitting a word here or there, but having no sense of how I might actually put a sentence together, much less a coherent thought.

In that same kitchen, to make the shift from the prosaic actions of prep work to the poetry of putting a plate together to send out to a diner (at least I hope that’s what’s happening) makes the metaphor even more alive for me. Should we choose to live imaginatively, we are both translators and poets of this life of ours, seeking how we might say what needs to be said in the best way possible. To borrow words from

:

Those words still translate.



Peace
Milton