So The PoCo October-resident-poet, Twitches, came up with a cool play-with-words prompt.
You take a poem, perhaps one you are not attached to, and stuff it in BabelFish and see what comes out.
Nathan offered a very nice poem of his up in the comments, which I borrowed – with permission since it was offered up – and this is what happened (with a lot of line break and punctuation changes).:
* * *
The ear
In the evening.
In the cooks. One enters
the trees underneath.
The street that a woman
shouts towards -
outside – for is a little while.
In a certain place
the children deplore. In the terror
and the rage as if in the war.
The complaint of a power saw disappears
in a complaint of the rapturous in the horizon.
The wing of a subject. Crow, with staple.
The carillon of the wind,
at night. A congealed
flashing of the light moves
in the window of the neighbor. White
flashes of the skin in the blue vibration.
* * *
This poems is Nathan’s, translated back and forth from English to Portuguese four times. I cheated a little, because ecstatic translated to ectático and never turned. I liked rapturous as a synonym of ecstatic, especially because it reminded me of raptors, or birds of prey. And we all know crows and ravens aren’t birds of prey, they are scavengers. But still. I liked it. As I do crows and ravens.
I liked the companionability of preying and of feeding on carrion. And I left bells as carillon. Because it reminded me of carrion. “Carillon is a musical instrument composed of at least 23 carillon bells, arranged in chromatic sequence, so tuned as to produce concordant.” And I like concordant. We are concordant.
* * *
So go to The PoCo and see where it started (Nathan is a terrific poet, and his original is so good) and try one yourself.
Playing with words? It is great fun, and a good exercise in poetry-making.
Related posts:
“In a certain place
the children deplore. In the terror
and the rage as if in the war.”
Love it. It even rhymes!