I revisit the idea of innate language—languages we have always known and have yet to speak.
One of my last cinepoems, Keeping Up with the Huidobros, used a confrontational method of translating a translation, more specifically, leveraging the homophonic (sound) to get new meaning from poems. In this latest cinepoem, “Translating Myself”, I apply what poet Clark Coolidge once said of writing poetry: “It had to make itself something through me.” In this spirit, I’ve layered my own words to create new poems from one.
Translating myself
This is what we hurt or hurl
or vex and transpose: the
opining horizon, leaving us.
There is a green leaf in the fire.
My flesh, you’ve made the two
of us a blind study. We’ve left
our vortex, grainy and laminated
in space, and we never reach
the summit of suns, big yolk
growths, an autumn phenomenon,
bringing us kilometers of numerical frosts.
I’ve been waiting to hear from you—
the other you—the silence is never
too long like the sleeve of my skin.
How we multiple etcetera our thoughts,
how we remain etched in this cosmic
fluid. Here the screen malfunctions.
I am a radio. I am the soundwave.
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas • Poet 