Friday, March 26, 2010

Translitic Poetry

Taken from "In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop" by Steve Kowit. Steve, you're a gentleman.

A translitic is a poem "translated" from a foreign language by paying attention not to the meaning of the words but to their sounds. The poet uses as a guide whatever homonymic associations come to mind. So a line like "Garni vers un plus immortel" (from a pom by Jules Laforgue) might vaguely sound like "Garnish worst of plush immortals" or "Carnivore's impulsion or tells" or "Carny verse unplugs the mortals." Needless to say, it is easier to use a poem in a language you don't know. You can stick close to your first reading or, in later drafts, simply use what you have as a springboard and go as far afield of the original poem as you wish, making the final poem entirely your own.

So here is my poem. Translated from the Swahili. I will first post the original, followed by my first translitic iteration, and then my final draft.

     KUNA SIRI GANI HASA?! (Original)
     by: Atoya Dadi
  1. Kichwa kinanizunguka ,kila nikifikiria
    Ni wapi ilipotoka, nani aloivumbua
    Ni nini hassa hakika, mie havijanelea
  2. Kama ni mila hakika, iweje imeenea
    Kwa bara la afrika,yuropa hata asia
    Fikira zinaniwaka, hili nataka kujua
  3. nnani alotamka, fikiraze kaenea
    Dunia ikaitika, wazo lake kachukua
    Wazungu maafrika,hata na wachina pia
  4. Kina mama pasi shaka, ndio waliotuzaa
    Hata awe na haraka, anakimbia balaa
    Mkoba hujipachika, hatakama hajavaa
  5. Mkoba wa mkononi, kwa kina mama hadaa
    ukimuona njiani, mbwembwezake ni balaa
    Akiufungua ndani, wallahi utashangaa

then...

    CAN I SEE YOUR EERIE HOUSE?! (Draft 1)
    by: Luke Felt   

1.    Kitchen Zucchini kills necrophilia.
       Nice walking hippopotamus, not alive bamboo.
       Zucchini has a paprika, we have genitalia.
2.    Common manila paprika, a Quiji. I mean it.
       A queer bar in Africa, Europe and Asia;
       fickle ear a zamboni, now talk a cut who-hah.
3.    Mommy, a lot and corn filled raise. Canine!
       Doing it with the IT guy was a lame, catch you, idea.
       What’s with you, my freaky hat, now watching a pie?
4.    Keener mama passes shaker into wally, or does the?
       Hotter are the maracas on a give me a dollar.
       My cola hoochy patch leaks: a hat and camel and java.
5.    My cola warm cone only clocking a mama hat, ah!
       You key a moon, own a ninja, and when bazooka nebula...
       I kill you fungus and awning. Wallaby, who would shot God?

Finally...

    CAN I SEE YOUR EERIE HOUSE?! (Final Draft)
    by: Luke Felt

1.    Catching Zachary killed the night time.
       I was walking, hips outstretched, but not lying. Barely.
       Zachary had a palid face, we had generosity.
2.    Commonalities provided a needless experience:
       queer babbling about Afros, your home, etcetera.
       Wander near the trombones, now talking doo-da, doo-da.
3.    Morning: a walk in corn fields, raising hell.
       Doing it now, what’s mine made tame. Watching your ideas!
       What’s with you, my friendly fat cow? Watching awhile?
4.    The other mothers pass, shaking, into walls. The orchestras
       are hot with maracas. Give me a holler.
       My cool new house leaks about a quart of water.
5.    My cool new house warns for only a moment of
       you screaming a tune about midgets. And when you looked around you,
       I killed the fungus in the night time. Now ask me, who shot God?


Writing these were a lot of fun. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Exercise taken from: http://funkwallace.blogspot.com/2008/02/writing-exercise-translitic-taken-from.html

Monday, March 22, 2010

Quarter-year review:

So the year is almost 1/4th of the way over, and I've decided to recap.

On January 6th I won the Boise Weekly Fiction 101 contest with my story "The Swells."

Here is what it looked like:

Pretty cool huh?
That same day I had teriyaki chicken for lunch. I ate it at work, in the cafeteria, while pondering my future. The fortune cookie said this:


Yes! Damn right, fortune cookie. I popped the fractured cookie in my mouth and savored its sugary goodness. This was the year of Luke, I knew it. I sat poised to take over the literary world with my small-town newspaper publishing credits. The universe was on my side.

Then I got laid off.  January 18th. My daughter's birthday. Suddenly, I had nowhere to eat my teriyaki.

Now I am a slob with too much time on my hands, and I'm running out of excuses for not writing. That's really what this blog is for, I think: to encourage its author to write something.

All in all, I guess I'm calling the first quarter of this year a wash, but the game ain't over yet. I'm ready to pounce. I feel like a young Simba, and the world is my Zazu. C'mon rest of the year, where you at? Look who's got a blog! Not so tough now, huh?

Chabon is coming!

I used to have a blog that wasn't this one. In it I would post some of my favorite short story openings. I figure that idea wasn't such a bad one, so I'm going to repost one of the openings here.

Michael Chabon is coming to The Cabin on April 7th. This is from his story "Werewolves in Their Youth." It was originally published in The New Yorker.

I had known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.

Did I mention that he's coming to Boise?