Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TRANSLATION, by DEIRDRE O'CONNOR


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TRANSLATION, by                    
First Line: Though there's no such thing as a 'self,' I missed it
Subject(s): Language; Words; Vocabulary


Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it --
the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly
like a book an old love sent with an inscription
in his hand, whatever it meant,
After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . .

-- the script of it like the way my self felt
learning German words by chance -- Mitgefuhl,
Unheimlichkeit -- and the trailing off that happened
because I knew only the feelings, abstract
and international, like ghosts or connotations
lacking a grammar, a place to go:

this was the way my self felt when it started
falling apart: each piece of it clipped
from a garden vaguely remembered
by somebody unrecognizable --
such a strange bouquet that somebody sent
to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.


Copyright (c) 2001 by The Modern Poetry Association.
This poem appears in the September 2001 issue of Poetry Magazine.
http://www.poetrymagazine.org





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