Anxious Languages / Langues anxieuses

1

Do you understand, Genie?

You aren’t what you please.

You are not what you worry.

She is scared of silent men.

Anxiety struggles play.

Sudden flowers,

Lose scent.

When you remember your demons,

Influence the heat.

You aren’t a fairy.

When will you understand,

And be a comfortable you?

You are what worries you.

 

2

I take the covering of the teapot

The teapot is iron, painted with flowers on white background

The teapot is white iron, shaped like a coffee pot.

Ma payja ano pa

Juice of love

I take the covering off the white iron teapot, and put it on the side of the wooden table.

I take the kettle and pour the boiling water of the kettle in the open iron teapot

Me kan sei wo ho

The tear of fear

I take off the covering, I put it aside, I pour the water.

I pick up the covering and put it back on the iron teapot

The tea topped teapot is full of hot water.

Touch touch of tera

Ewo eh shi

The tea in the white glass has the taste of the tea coloured tea.

Showcased by white glass, the water vapour and the hot water is poured in the white glass with hot edges. Eh wo whom

Sehr gut

 

Ma somme

Sehr gut

Man khin

Pearl don

Didi ma tem

Touch touch of tear Sat of seat

Eh wo ho

I drink and then I forget about the glass of tea I am thirsty

I take the glass and drink

I forget about the glass of tea

I drink a gulp of tea

The tea is cold.

 

3

Fascinated, quit, dictate

Open, pour, passion

Cruel, inadequate, humble

Dance, parkour, graze, cry

Arbitrary War.

 

4

My words, my heart

Came back rushing through the wind

Its back, came back

Its sore, the heart

 

Anxiety rushing from my work

The office

Lots of love and agony

I lost my anxiety

 

5

The pencils, plush and expensive,

expressing and caressing strangely.

She seems strange, in my opinion,

a bizarre blizzard and a strange pattern,

expensive thoughts but expressive,

become one, chère Ella.

 

6

I text my bursts

In a class of rice

Your foot explodes me

Piss the wind

Liquor liquor liquor

Today saggy our looks

Life of verses mess up everything

Relaxation and its breathing

Therefore lol scars

No force torch of time

The water cuts deserted soul

And the heart eaten up by acid

Son of iron our strength lives

 

 

Toronto Experimental Translation Collective

TETC

Wasp Early          (Benjamin de Boer)

Dive later web sucking all sting

damaged, transient world

Fold wings a farewell weaving

flying slate cry later, wolf destined nursery kneel
belief suffers – dilate sucking

Hot sky while loft, ear preaches this tide rising

riddance twin folding

Gong sound, gale song met forked in night

to veil wind and nod to our heat, self east rising

Sway here stop for penance

lean over that day’s

highway, weevil forking

toe for binding

words dredge in the hot tempo

“Ing” of flyloop caught

“Ing” of web rattle

Wasp pry open with force, probe bifurcates beloved, rennet lurch

That look wonder

She stains a number in seat

Patrols in venom spasm

o shit, spittin faxxxxxxxxxx!!! :O          (Joachim Comay-Newman)

itch — ich — i, ichabod, the almost named— ach, the throat clears —

each sentence is a fidgeting — i chew syntax, syllable — achoo — anthrax — ell oh ell —

analyst couch — rave couch — what is couched? —

what is caught in the teeth and doesn’t come out? —

shhh — chuchotted — standoffish — cauchemarred —

i caught fish bigger than a sportscar — didn’t — wish i did —

dispeech — mere spit — spitch — sitch drivel

i’ll hitch it to ur listening fer a bit — rabbit fur — remember? — its skin — it’s skin —

u were in its habit — its orbit — a skinned thing doesn’t bite — a naked —

a nuked — u were narcotongued — necrotinged — its — it’s —

hinged — yes, this — a squeaking hinge — ditch —

the dating apps — ditch — the fricative — fucking — up the stomach —

i am interesting — high pitched, nasal, sibilant — rich — effeminate —

ditch — this — ditch — trench — blunched— this squished ant —

i am a kid — i am a kid — i got ditched — miss u

Under erasure          (Eddy Wang)

Anxiety from you, from me, to you, to me                                                              

I put the other under erasure. I could not help it. I could not bear to tell them. I originally circumscribed myself to the words I have been “given”^J. over the years. As we went on, I became a tissue^A. of all your words. These thoughts, from you, from me, formed me. In the superscript^J, you resided: abbreviated, unaware of how your word^T. shaped me. But I crossed out your initials. I did not want to disclose to you how these words of anxiety were spurred by our relation. I only wanted to credit your gifts, I could not bear to name the wounds.

From the other, the head speaks

The Other was always the motor^X. of my anxiety. Despite what some philosophers may say^X., my anxiety is not directed at the nothingness of existence. It was born when you^X. came into my life. (Piercing words. I pace, endlessly around my room^X.). Call it fear of the other, if you think anxiety is not directed at an object–I still call it anxiety, (social). Anxiety became the way to unbelly the other’s unconscious view of me. I could not discern how you felt through your conscious words^X., like a paranoid sleepwalker, I found myself caught in a field of signs^X. prying to make sense of the hidden meanings beneath your words, that interrupt your words.^X. I wanted to recorrect my behavior, so that the other’s unconscious would not abject^X. me out of their life.

This desire to speak to you, but this hesitance to say everything^X.. My language struggled for determinacy in a relation that precludes certainty. And so, anxiety had power^X. over me, it made you recoil away while I stuffed myself with concerns.^X. At the same time: every act of power is met with an act of resistance. The winds of anxiety taught me how to fly. Catch the rat and turn it into a mouse. 鼠^X. Get intimate with it, no need to hide.^X. I converted the agitation into a well of concentration: energy. (气)^X. Ambiguous energy^X., the elation of in-sync togetherness^X. could collapse into precarity^X. at the turn of a phrase. It could be on my end, or on yours, or just the way anxiety is mediated. By language: anxiety occurs in the gaps of translatability.^X. Anxious-energy, an intensity that brings me to activity, but also terror. (Coin-flip–Heads). It compresses me to my head. The excessive agitation released through repetitive thought. Tired, I am made to think in circles. Trying to focus on the present, I beg myself to be put under erasure. But a hurricane of memories ransack my shell. Look awry. I uncover myself–naked.            

Inside, the truncation

What can I remember? Nothing before I was 7 when my unconscious was structured in Chinese.^X. I had to learn English to survive in Canada, but that meant locking up those first 7 Chinese years.^X. When the pathways in my mind are locked up by wounds, how else do I think but in gyres^X.? My internal map scrambled into hieroglyphs. It speaks, it keeps speaking. Is anxiety silent? Do I fill my head with chatter to avoid it? Or is the language of anxiety its substance? Words, thoughts, rush and repeat. I need your words but you are not there. Tracing a sign. You left.^X. My words left in you, yours left in me. I acquired language through you.^X. This acquisition of words has brought me the gift-wound^X. of anxiety. I cannot return to when you were not in my tissue: We are beyond erasure. Nihilation. 无^X..

          (Fan Wu)

“But the journey to the end of the possible demands freedom of temperament, that of a horse that has never been mounted.” - G. B.

春

ONI WON WOISE LEFT

yi xin er yi

  l’byzantine roster reaches first

o O o o oO oo ooooooo OO o oO  ooO

Oo oo ooOo oOOOoOo oOOo oooOOOoOooo

oOOOOOoooOooooaooooooOooo

my little “TMJ of the mind”

    blankscreen Cobain season

ma attente      l’oubligationize

            andrei I care for u                   ya hey

bilibigigiblous                                                              soeurscrewt

            pigstiff tater matters

per astra vaunt altar                                                   nematode

chimney                                  fifty walls of ice between

(baby teeth protein smoothy)

elaheemhehe                          alljerkannojaymakeyikeadullboi

 

天

          (Ami Xherro)

1.

I was happy when my enemy died,

and unlucky when my friend died.

2.

We fought so much over work,

we don’t see each other or have tea!

Oh, idiot.

Even the teeth fight with the tongue,

and still they hang around!

3.

You ate with your hands as much as you could,

You worked on your belly, you pitiful loaf!

4.

O talker

O tittle tattler

You flaunt your tongue

                        like a cane in the wind

5.

Better to fight a sage, sister,

than to kiss an idiot.

6.

Bad things don’t find me in my sleep,

they never find me.

On the side the cows turn their backs when they sleep,

the wind comes and I wait for the wind.

These aphorisms are from a Dritëro Agolli poem, an Albanian naturalist poet who evoked the epic voice of Albanian lyric poetry. The translations preserve the brevity of the aphoristic form, while the meaning is slanted by the cultural valences between Albanian and English, and the temporal anachronisms, both in the poet invoking the past and the translator invoking the poet, hence why they fail in uncertain degrees.