169. Defamiliarized English – Rena J. Mosteirin
My new book Experiment 116 takes Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 through all the languages in Google Translate (in pairs and trios) creating new variations of this beloved poem in a radically defamiliarized English.
While studying creative writing as an undergraduate, I experimented with erasures. Erasure poems typically use some canonical text as the source text, but I used the machine-generated and filter-defying gibberish of spam email as my jumping-off point. I love defamiliarized English, perhaps because I was raised in a trilingual family: my father’s family speaks Spanish and my mother’s family speaks a dialect of German.
Working with these texts was fun, especially when the grammatical errors were strange or beautiful. I found the same to be true when an online translation tool called Babelfish came out. I eagerly used this to translate poems into Spanish and then back into English again. Then I’d try taking the poem from Spanish into German and then back to English, getting a completely different result. These days I use Google Translate, and I urge my students to take their own poems through these revisionary paces so that they can re-imagine the ways in which their poems can speak.
My new book Experiment 116 takes Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 through all the languages in Google Translate (in pairs and trios) creating new variations of this beloved poem in a radically defamiliarized English. At my wedding, the officiant read Sonnet 116. This is a poem I know by heart. So why would I want to make it less familiar? Perhaps because this is a new way to read and engage with a text that I love.
I’m excited by the different possibilities for this approach to reading and writing. Authentic poetic language for the multilingual reader needs to nod to several languages and codes at once in order to be realistic, such as glimpses of a phrase half in one language and half in another, or diction correctly translated from one language combined with syntax left over from the first. These moments allow a global idiom to emerge.
– Rena J. Mosteirin
