Day 21 NaPoWriMo 2020
(Photo by Aashish Vaidya)
Pale Cast
The subconscious mind intends
A potent, but merciful, rosy scene
Nearby, the desk portrait decays in blue light,
My soul freezes at every lore That Man concocts
And my face goes raw.
The camera captures my chiseled face in forest
But my last photograph doesn’t flatter
even in profile.
Now tuned into pandemonium bereft of data
misguidance makes even the sun ebb
In a pale cast.
Cast normalcy
aside and doubts linger.
Notes: Day 21 of NaPoWriMo 2020. Today’s prompt:
“….asks you to make use of today’s resource. Find a poem in a language that you don’t know, and perform a “homophonic translation” on it. What does that mean? Well, it means to try to translate the poem simply based on how it sounds. You may not wind up with a credible poem at the end, but this can be a fun way to step outside of your own mind for a bit, and develop a poem that speaks in a distinctive voice. As an example, here are the first four lines of a poem by the Norwegian poet Gro Dahle….”
I picked a poem Underneath Me in Romanian by Domnica Drumea. Here’s the original:
sub mine se întinde
o pată mare şi roşie
nu mai pot trăi decât cu lichide
mirosul frigiderelor pline cu mâncare
îmi face rău
închisă în camera fără ferestre
mă las fotografiată din faţă
şi din profil
tu n-ai iubit pe nimeni niciodată
mă ghidez după sunete ca un orb
îmi păzesc castronul
castronul meu gol
şi lingura mea docilă
Here’s my first translation which was pretty jumbled up:
What the mind intends
a potent mercy rosy
near my portrait decay blue light chide
My soul frigid every lore feline cue man cares
In my face raw
In chisel face in camera in far forest
My last photography didn’t flatter
Is the profile
Tune in, albeit pandemonimum a bit per no men niche data
misguidance dupes the sun at its ebb
In my past cast null
Cast null my goal
See linger my do silly
Here’s the actual translation by Anca Barbulescu:
underneath me
a big red stain spreads
I can only live with liquids
the smell of fridges full of food
makes me sick
locked in the windowless room
I let myself be photographed from the front
and from the side
you never loved anyone
I guide myself by sound like a blind man
I guard my bowl
my empty bowl
and my docile spoon
It seems, Maureen’s (Thorson) gone back to 2013 NaPoWriMo prompts for many of the inspiration for 2020 prompts. So if you’ve made it this far, here’s my 2013 NaPoWriMo poem on the same prompt. I looks like I picked Gro Dahle’s poem in 2013. In re-reading the poem, I think I like how it turned out.
