November Newsletter

Hello hello!! If you’re new to the newsletter, welcome! Below, you’ll find some updates, some recommendations, and some insight into my writing life. Always feel free to reach out on Instagram if you have any questions for me about writing or reading or translation or anything else!

These are snippets from my blog posts on Patreon. Feel free to explore those memberships at the link below:

Writing Life Updates

Projects Other Than The Novel. So all of that steam I built up around the novel the last couple of months kind of evaporated in the face of a couple of massive school projects, a job interview, and an aborted move to a new work location (it got delayed again, but I'll get there eventually!). The novel just felt dramatically insurmountable. But, I got a little excited about some other things. I've got this short story I've been fooling around with for awhile now that I really think is shaping up into something interesting, for instance, and I want to get back into mistranslation. But I'm still gonna finish this dang book by the end of November though.

Recommendations

Books

• How the Boogeyman Became a Poet by Toby Keith Jr. is a memoir-in-verse about a young Black man navigating his senior year of college and freshmen year of high school, trying to figure out his identity as a person of faith and as someone who might possible be gay. I read a physical copy, but I've heard excellent things about the audio book as well.

• Black Girl You Are Atlas by Renee Watson and illustrated by Ekua Holmes is a wonderful collection of poetry mixed with collage that makes it feel like a piece of art. The poems come together to tell a wonderful coming-of-age story and stand alone to celebrate Black girlhood.

Song

• "Anthems for A Seventeen-Year-Old-Girl" by yeule is from a movie that I'm obsessed with called I Saw the TV Glow (which is a very weird, very scary movie, not for the faint of heart!). I'm not sure what about the song I'm attracted to exactly? But there's a yearning quality to it that I like.

In Depth Review-Paul Celan and the Trans Tibetan Angel

I had the wonderful fortune of taking a class with Susan Bernofsky who translated this wonderful book, so I was so excited to read it! I've never read anything by Yoko Tawada before, but now I think I'll track down some more of her books. This one is very strange and very beautiful (and very expertly translated) and I definitely recommend it, especially if you're looking for a quick, but deep and compelling, read.

I think Bernofsky's translation work really shines here, because part of Patrik's neuroses revolve around words. There are sections devoted to the number of letters and words and how that relates to how they fit together or how they influence his actions, and Bernofsky has made these moments feel wonderful in English.

Behind the Scenes

This is literally a how-to for one particular project I did, but mistranslation can take a lot of different forms! If this interests you at all, I highly encourage you to look at one of the books I've mentioned above for other ideas of what you can do.

Step 1: Find a poem.

I found my starter poem on Versopolis, which published European poetry in translation. I specifically found a poem in a language I didn't speak, and tried to look at the English translation as little as possible so it wouldn't influence me. I settled on "pristav" by Veronika Dianišková.

Step 2: Phonetic translation

 This step is pretty straight forward: I sounded out the Slovak and tried to figure out what it sounded like in English. I didn't worry about grammar at this point much, I truly just figured out the sounds. Once I'd done that for every line, I created a pretty, grammatical version with my own line breaks and punctuation I felt made sense. "pristav" gave me the title "pissed off," and I numbered the poems in a series.

Want to see snippets from my work-in-progress? Subscribe to my Patreon for free below!

Love and gratitude, friends. See you next month.