Final Thoughts

Multilingual Poetics

You’ve just done something brave!

You moved through languages that may not be yours, and let them speak to you anyway. That is already a poetic act.

Across these three sessions, we moved from the stark landscapes of Iceland to Mariangela Gualtieri’s poetic observation of the body and nature, and into the edges of desire in Brazilian Portuguese. Three groups of women writers, three different relationships to language — and yet something ran through all of them: the conviction that language is not a transparent container, but a living material, full of weight, resistance, and possibility.

I hope you noticed, somewhere in these exercises, that the moment of not-quite-understanding is not a failure. It is an opening. When we don’t fully grasp a word, we fill it with ourselves. That is where your poem begins.

Go back to the word you held at the beginning of this session. Did it find its way into something you wrote today? If not, it’s still yours. Carry it. Let it wait for the right poem.

A few things I’d like you to take with you

Translation is a form of close reading — the closest reading there is. Every time you translate, you are asking: what is this word really doing? What would I have to give up to move it into another tongue? These are the same questions a poet asks.

Not every poem starts with an inspiration, sometimes it begins with memory, sometimes with an object forgotten on the table, or with something that has been stuck on our heads for a long time. In poetry, characters can spring from invented biographies, from fragments of our own lives or from small observations of everyday life. A poem can also be a place we inhabit: a room, a street, a photograph. From reading other poems in translation and being exposed to other sounds, images and traditions you were invited to inhabit the languages you carry and maybe new languages you had never explored. From here, you can begin a new chapter of multilingual writing.

I would like to close our class with a poem that I have written in English, inspired by both my favourite poet, the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert and the Icelandic language.

I hope you have enjoyed this journey as much as I have!

THE TONGUE

To Zbigniew Herbert

Inadvertently he passed his agile tongue on the border of my left ear, kynþokkafull. My ear has pointy teeth, it snatched it. It now lives inside of me, like a grálúða. It brushes against my heart and my diaphragm, it travels all the way down to my vagina as if it was swimming against the bottom of the ocean. It stirs trieb, tesão, from the bottom. He, whom I deprived of a tongue, stares at me with his obliquus dark eyes and waits for a word. Yet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to him – my broken Icelandic, the new word I just learned – kynþokkafullur. The grálúða’s right eye migrated so far to the other side of its head, it can only see forward. Like the fish, I am stuck looking fyrir framan, I lack a past. He stands in front of me, lacking his stolen tongue. It lives in me, it has encountered mine and they have been melting from excess of heavy goodness in my mouth.

(Francesca Cricelli)

THE TONGUE

Inadvertently I passed the border of her teeth and swallowed her agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It brushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls of an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.She whom I deprived of a voice stares at me with big eyes and waits for a word. Yet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to her – the stolen one or the one which melts in my mouth from an excess of heavy goodness.

(Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Alissa Valles)

Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) was a Polish poet, essayist, and playwright whose work explored history, morality, and the human condition under political oppression. A resistance member during World War II, he later wrote with intellectual rigor, irony, and classical influence, drawing on Greek and Roman thought. His major works include Mr. Cogito, Report from the Besieged City, and Still Life with a Bridle. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s leading literary voices, Herbert remains known for his ethical clarity and independent spirit.

Alissa Valles is a poet and translator born in Amsterdam to a Dutch mother and American father, raised between the U.S. and the Netherlands, and educated at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She is the author of poetry collections including Orphan Fire, Anastylosis, and Hospitium, and is especially known for her translations of Zbigniew Herbert, including his Collected Poems and Collected Prose. Her work explores language, identity, and history with lyrical precision. She lives in Cambridge.

Styrkelse af forskellige stemmer gennem flersproget skrivning og innovativ digital uddannelse.

You’ve just done something brave!

A few things I’d like you to take with you

Zbigniew Herbert

Further Readings