Kameron Ray Morton
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What Helped Me Most This Week

What Helped Me Most This Week

Or, experiments in mistranslation.

Kameron Morton
September 28, 2025

I’m trying to do something creative every day. I’m documenting it here.

This week, I posted to the blog twice, which is double from last week! Still not ideal, but here we are. I revised a micro, watched the Charlie Sheen documentary on Netflix (I highly recommend that, actually!), worked on Penelle Magazine, and managed to work mistranslation into my most recent HTML assignment for grad school. I’m sure it will surprise no one that the thing that helped my creativity the most was the little bit of mistranslation I managed to do.

For a while when I was bored at work, I’d play around with a mistranslation series built around “Deer Park” by Wang Wei, which is a weirdly famous poem because of how many times it’s been translated AND this book, which examines all the translations. I created rules for myself that involved Google Translate, multiple thesauruses, and the poetry generator WpN. I haven’t messed with the project in a while, but when I was given an assignment to create a table with at least four columns and ten rows, making some sort of ‘create a poem’ was the first thing I thought of. I created a table based on the mistranslations I’ve done of “Deer Park.” I put it in my blog, but I’m also putting it here for convenience:

Line One	Line Two	Line Three	Line Four
empty mountain	no one comes back	shadows return	again
hills	voice	shadow is dusk into the tree	an emerald
Hear the sound returned	Doe in shadows	woods, light	no fourth line
barren place	shadows are eroding	groves, distorted	light the swamp again
desolate hilltop	windswept tones	shapes become distortion	the dim marsh reignites the swamp
wind blown mountaintop	misshaped into Response	overhead, trees	reignite the swamp
wisdom set,	becomes deformed	an off weightlessness topped	no fourth line
Restoring the faded weightlessness of trees	no second line	no third line	no fourth line
The breeze no longer blows over the peak	evergreen floatability	Translation shapes realization	no fourth line

I recommend using some sort of random generator to pick each line of your four-line poem. And please, feel free to send them my way! This is the sort of thing that would go great in a zine.

I took a masterclass on overcoming writer’s block where the author (whose name I’ve forgotten, sorry to him!) talked about how he envied musicians because they’re able to noodle around on their instrument to get into a writing headspace. He felt there wasn’t really an equivalent for writers. For me, mistranslation is the way to ‘noodle around’ and get the creativity flowing. Even when I can’t come up with anything to write, I can always turn to mistranslation.

Love and gratitude, as always.