Words Words Words

On August 10, 2026 By Mick CanningIn Fiction, Painting, words, writing25 Comments

Words are abstractions. The word ‘leaf’ can conjure up a million different images, but fails to describe any single one of them. One needs a hundred – a thousand – or more words to just come close to a perfect description, but even then it falls short.

In the well-known phrase, a picture paints a thousand words, but you would need many more than that to accurately describe said picture. We still think largely in pictures – naturally, we would have evolved that way. In the days before we had language our thoughts would inevitably have been composed of images. We may put words to these images as we think them, but they are still there. When we think through a plan of action, or instructions, for example, we tend to accompany those words with visual imagery. Even if we are engaged in mathematical reasoning or language learning, I think we tend to visualise those figures or words as we work. And when we dream, our dreams are overwhelmingly visual.

My copy of the Georgia O’Keeffe Painting Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy

But sometimes, even as a writer and compulsive note taker, I can get so absorbed into a landscape that I have no wish to try to describe it, no matter how many words I might use. I just want to observe it, to be in it. Words feel redundant. And I’ve said this before, but this sort of compulsion to record things, or photograph them, feels like a way to try to own them.

And words are noise. More than noise. They get in the way and distract from what they are representing. They are like the finger pointing at the moon in the Buddhist parable, where ironically attention is drawn to the finger, rather than the moon which the finger is attempting to draw our attention to. The famous painting by Rene Magritte The Treachery of images pictures a pipe with the writing: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ beneath. But it is this very caption which names it.

Conversely, though, a single word can suggest an entire world. Sometimes their power isn’t so much in their ability to define something, but their ability to conjure images and memories seemingly from nothing. Like an incantation. And each word contains maybe hundreds of meanings and nuances, different meanings to different people. I am reminded of two of Borges’ short stories: The Mirror and the Mask, and Undr. In the first story, a court poet reduces the literature of Ireland to a single line, and in the second a fictional Nordic people have a poetry that consists entirely of one seemingly mystical word, Undr (although, naturally, it’s not quite as simple as that…). And this makes me think of the importance of the spaces between the notes in music, and the rests – we need the spaces between the words to think. To listen properly.

Over the years I have been drawn to painting or photography, or to writing, depending on what I want to say. To draw attention to the way the dawn light strikes the tops of the trees, for example, undoubtedly the visual arts are best. But to describe the anguish experienced before taking an important decision then clearly words are required. But note that in each case, it would be possible to get results with the other forms. And poetry frequently straddles them all.

And then there is the myth that God has a name not known to anyone – His real name, from which all His power is derived, and which must remain secret. For once a name is known, it loses its power.

Words are illuminating, words are abstractions, words are dangerous, words are treacherous.

Words are overused, like this…

Lost and Found in Translation

On March 16, 2020 By Mick CanningIn poetry, translations, writing15 Comments

Untitled-Grayscale-02

I have read many novels, short stories and poems translated into English from other languages, but I wonder how much of what I read is true to the original intentions of the authors?

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short stories and poems, all of them in his native Spanish. Although I did buy one collection in Spanish, my own knowledge of that language has always been too poor for me to do anything other than read it slowly and laboriously and, undoubtedly, to miss many of the nuances in the writing. So for that reason, I’ve had to read them in translation.

And in any case, even if I spoke Spanish well I could do little more than read it as translation in my head. Unless I spoke it like a native speaker, I would still likely miss much that the author intended to convey.

And so I buy translations.

Zima Junction by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a long poem that tells of the poet’s visit to his home town in Siberia, having left some years before to go to live and work in a city. It is a beautiful depiction of rural life in Russia at the time, seen afresh after a gap of several years away, and describes the poets now ambiguous relationship with it.

Long poems can be good vehicles for describing journeys; my own poem The Night Bus does just that, and was written because in that instance I could not find any other medium that worked as well to convey what I wanted to say.

Another favourite of mine is Dart by Alice Oswald, which describes a journey from the source to the sea along the River Dart in Devon, England. She gives voices to the various people encountered along this journey, and to the animals living there…Since it is written in English, I am not left with any worry I am missing things the poet wanted to say, other than perhaps my own occasional inability to understand her.

I have a book of poems from North East India. It is an anthology that I bought in India, with contributions from a huge number of poets. A few of them wrote in English, but the majority of them wrote in other languages – some in Bengali, but the majority in one or other of the plethora of languages to be found in the North East States. And, sadly, most of the translations appear to have been done as a straightforward translation word for word, with no thought given to the feeling of the poem. Any rhythm the poems may originally have had seems to have been lost. The sentences are often clunky and uncomfortable to read. Their meanings have become lost in translation.

But Zima Junction has a natural and comfortable rhythm

The translator of a poem has, to my mind, a task that is more difficult than the translator of prose. Yet, paradoxically, they also have more freedom. More difficult, because they have to get across to the reader ideas or meanings that may be partly concealed in idiomatic language used by the author that perhaps we have no parallel for in English, and hence they may have to completely alter the structure of that part. This will affect a line of poetry far more than it would a line of prose. Immediately, the rhythm of the poem is disrupted, the word count of the line changed.

Yet the reader of a poem has a right to expect a poem. And so, strangely, the translator has the freedom to re-write the poem. In the need for the end result of their translation to be a poem, they may have to completely alter much of the structure to enable the translated words to reassemble themselves as a poem. And so the translators of poems must, by essence, be poets themselves.

So to return to Borges and Yevtushenko, when I read the poems I do wonder whether I am actually reading their poems, or someone else’s?