Aesthetically Pleasing Books
Marilyn
Hacker translates from the French into English; that’s really nice of her.
There are many French poets, now and from long ago, I and others can’t read
because we don’t know French. We love poems, yet there are certain poems we
can’t know. In the introduction to Vénus Khoury-Ghata book Nettles (Graywolf, 2008), Marilyn Hacker
mentions that Vénus says: “My mother is illiterate in two languages.” I don’t
want to even think about the languages I’m illiterate in! I’m just thankful
people translate work they find important. Although, I don’t want to talk about
translation here, and how things are lost, and how the original is so much
better, because, basically, poems translated into English have moved me, have
mattered, and have inspired me in the same fashion poems written in English
have. There are only things to be gained! Translations are little windows
overlooking a culture or a time where there was once no window. What I want to
talk about here is far less important. I want to talk about books I can’t read,
books I have purchased out of the sheer love of design, in languages I don’t
understand. Maybe you, too, have done this? Maybe you have bought a book for its foxing,
or for the way it smells, or because the sides of the pages are blue,
regardless of how you are going to comprehend its meaning. Sometimes, I flip
through their pages and (because I can’t read them) I stare at a poem as if it
were a photograph in a collection of black and white photography, an abstract
print that relates some obscure emotion through light and composition.
Carl Adamshick
