NaPoWriMo Day 16 Prompt: Write a “translation” of a poem written in a language you don’t actually know . . . (and try not to peek too much at the translation). Now, use the sound and shape of the words and lines to guide you, without worrying too much about whether your translation makes sense. (In my case, I didn’t look at all at the translation until after I’d written my poem. I wrote a translation of each line according to my intuition, then edited, trying to stay close to the original thread of the idea. My original was in Italian—a language I do not know.) Since I speak a bit of Spanish, there were three or four words whose meaning I could guess at, even though most of these guesses were found to be incorrect; nonetheless, they sped me on my way. I love getting to the part of my mind where something other than myself guides me, even though I hold the reins all the way–especially during the editing.

The poem I chose:

SPIAGGIA SETTEMBRE DEL ’64,  by Gabriele Frasca  (Link to that poem and its translation.)

The poem I wrote:

ESCAPE

Your life catches in its static house.
Nothing but the lightest footfall betrays its presence.
The door to the greatest house of all, the ocean’s edge,
tempts you to leave yourself and enter.
This echo of the ocean is the dove in you
that carries the message that you want to fly.
Motionless dove, I want to ride on your back
to the crack of sunrise—to its flower.
Forget your lone compulsions.
Leave your comfort.
Desert the logic that has frozen you.
If you could let this sick time pass,
you might grow less diverted as your distance from it grows.
Time’s ricochet might drive you to the canyon’s rim,
revealing to you that you no longer want to fall.
The stress of guilt slows down and if you choose to let it, falls behind.
Time will devour your past no matter how grand its scale––
revoke the sentence and set the guilty free.
You will pass and repass it on your round journey,
until your father, his wife, and your recalcitrance
finally wear away.

April 16, 2013, Judy Dykstra-Brown