Beneath your wings, love,
both of us seek shelter.
Our resistance no longer useful,
our screams no longer in rhythm.
I still see you,
day and night
and day.
I find comfort in our fall,
and hope in your beauty.
Together we will brave morning
hand in hand
heart in heart.
I rhyme softer in your words,
as we both dance through their echoes
‘till where it gets colder
and we seek warmth
where it has always been and
where we both came from.
As night falls to your wings, love,
only you and I will wait
for day to come.
4 comments:
I wrote this for a friend's birthday. She was having a lot of trouble at home, and this was to cheer her up and make her feel better. I wrote it in Dutch, originally. But I tried to make a translation. Very strange...
The last sentence is a lot simpler in Dutch and sounds a whole lot nicer. Anyway, this is as good a translation as I could make of it.
i think i can tell, a little bit, that this is a translation. maybe tinker a little bit more with some of the structure? i don't know. but i really liked the idea of screams being in rythm--its a different kind of concept. two grammatical points: i don't think you need the apostraphie (that doesn't look like the correct spelling but you know what i mean) with "echos", unless i totally missed the point of the sentence. also, in the third stanza, i don't like the word "had" at the end...again, i think you should look at the sentence and the grammatical structure and if i'm just not getting it, keep "had". but i think that it sounds better like this: "...we seek warmth/where it has always been and/where we both came from"
i agree with you about the last sentence...some things just aren't translated perfectly, other languages say things so much better sometimes. but i would do some restructuring on this sentence. maybe play with the imagery in the sentence, flipping it around--you and i wait only/for the night falling/off your wings, love.
or something to that effect. might be interesting to both end and begin the poem with the below/above wings imagery.
Thanks Literary Overdose!
Really helpful stuff!
I appreciate specific feedback :)
I always dislike translations. I somehow can't see them as translations anymore, they always become something entirely different. Somehow, in Dutch, this poem sounds more poetic and 'pretty'. But I like to work on my translation skills.
I believe Robert Frost said it best though: "Poetry is what gets lost in translation".
I think LO did a great job with this one. I really can't add much except one possibly helpful observation about translations.
I think every language has in it something of the culture and character of its native speakers and that is one reason it is so difficult to translate anything let alone poetry.
I remember translating a lot of Spanish literature and feeling completely frustrated by it until the professor I was working with at the time pointed out that I needed to give up on trying to literally translate it and even fudge the translation a little in order to capture the spirit of what was being said. In other words, write it in English as the author would have if they had written it in English in the first place. Seems obvious and maybe you already know this but I didn't. :) Thanks!
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