Thursday, August 28, 2008

Babelfish Poetry: For Momo-chan

Just want to make a small point about the beauty that can come from non-standard English--in this case, the babelfish translation of a Japanese news report of Momoko Ueda's painful fingernail accident. I've just removed some words and punctuation marks, inserted some line and stanza breaks, changed some capitalizations, and voila: a pretty damn good imagist poem.

The seeing eye dog surprised
the flash of the cameraman of the multitude produced
to run, suddenly.

Being flurried, tries probably to grasp the lanyard
“the painful [tsu]!” with voice was increased
being caught to the cord which was pulled

It peeled the nail of the left hand middle finger
the nail which peels off even cruelly fell to the land
the blood dripped from the finger

For a while holding down the finger
at that place
which it cannot move

It is painful
the face was twisted with pain
the tear floated in the eye

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are there any updates on how she's doing ?

The Constructivist said...

I'll ask the FMA to translate Momo-chan's blog forme over the weekend, CG.

Showed the poem to a friend in the department and she recommended the following New Yorker report on China's pre-Olympics crash course in English....