Poetry Translating as Expert Action
(honestly)K E Y: Addition
[Deletion]
Move [from source item]
( gurative meaning)1 When hands on heart we felt it unharden
2 can you recall in a heartbeat [suddenly] how our halves
3 rang [were] whole [true]once more, words by candlelight
4 how we lay translated, [and] spelt out in old esh
5 breath suspended us, wildfire fired us
6 happiness hung like smoke about us, outside
7 the small chill of fall, and so lying [were]
8 content in what we owned, the moment
9 which embraced us: then time caved in
10 one still hears the tapping behind the plaster
11 hollow, black mildewed drops slowly falling –1 How do I know there are woods here [there] when all that is here is night [darkness],
2 so much that darkness has brimfilled [even] the empty sockets of sight
3 as deep [bottom] as memory, prisoner prising [seeking] at walls to see.
4 Are my ngers brushing at trees or is darkness touching me?
5 And how do I know in the woods that what just shrieked was a bird,
6 when all I can hear is silence, sound inside-out, the unheard [soundless],
7 when even the hiss of my breath is [becomes] stillness, pitch-black and mute,
8 a deadening coal-dust that numbs [enters] my vocal chords to their root.
9 at shriek now a bird’s – was it wrenched out of dreaming [drowsiness] by the dark?
10 Or did love cry out, or abduction? Whatever – [and] [already] nothing’s there.
11 Between [by] the beats of my heart-clock, what [whither] drags [fall] me down, in what arc?
12 And how [where] must this blindman, my sight, [ nd] focus the sun through his eye?
13 Darkness and silence my judge and my witness – but would they swear?
14 How must I outdeafen the silence before that stilldead cry?
Figure 52. Semantic-field shifts on common lexical items in Toen wij and Krik