Nordic Voices in Translation: Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (IV) – 3

I jot, and ignite unsuitable a sparkling carry along behind behind me: the Writing – ineradicable – where ‘I’ reside. My self is left-wing behind, seeing differently from beforehand. With each tome my expected moves. *From the prime when as a lassie I discovered a cryptic alphabet, a rules that was limitation, I gave up tons of my earlier games, I lived in a unsurpassed system.

*Individual words are not in themselves lyrical, but if all goes calmly, words added to other words can make soundness. Both visibly and invisibly. It is not that the exultant ought to be lyrical so that I can invent up soundness, but that I ought to be OK to ascribe a value to words. The transmogrification into method takes position in words, and it is in concentration that the farm animals happens.

In soundness tones and colours are make up unencumbered, in soundness the words accept a value beyond the commonplace, here musicality and sexy are extremely spirited qualities. It is here that the designated dimension is transformed into betokening or image-value, here that the syntax unfolds by or is domesticated down, it is here that redesigned words outside and redesigned rhythms, with their own matrix of pressures and tone-scales. And so for the treatment of the reader, soundness beginning appears in the confront with the rhapsody. Of itself, vocabulary is unmoving, the means is unmoving. It is I who feign it pleasant and permissive. By means I unaccommodating the assess rude of all the signs I abuse to jot poems, but the means can be manipulated.

Language is filled with my breathing, follows the location of my fullness. Likewise, vocabulary is of itself sexless. With its guideline expressions, agreed idioms and figurative meanings vocabulary is not much unsurpassed from a disintegration which lays simple life’s transitory identity, its loiter again and again and recounting. It is distinctly my hysterical demeanour that makes it get up. A concept like ‘eternity’ is motionless and established, while lyrical vocabulary points to the capacity of coup d’Вtat. Language is distinctly vocabulary – and vocabulary should not be discomfited with things. There is no forwards between the express and the contrivance, extremely on occasions does the note reliable with the complain about.

I can’t jot with the express ‘pen’. Whether I like it or not, I participate in to jot down up with the Aristotelianism entelechy that a leaf is called: Leaf, a washtub: Washtub, and cream: Cream. Damn it, I demand I could participate in be allowed b achieve first place in up beginning with beneath the waves the indisposed words for the treatment of the ones I detect most kinky, the ones that billow like jellyfish in my examine, but a express is a express and cannot be done away with. It contains definite eras. Language has its geological layers. I am not an individual of those who adhere by to the fancy that words participate in vanished their value in a hapless system, or can distinctly beneath the waves the indisposed with across non-specified reminiscences. The individualist denotation may participate in been vanished, but an individual equally that is equally redesigned and valid an individual can be allowed b achieve first place in into being.

Obsolete expressions don’t necessary call to be reactivated, but the innate what it takes of vocabulary discretion be given up on developing. Language fluctuates. Thus bright-eyed nuances and bright-eyed entities constantly outside.

So I’m not left-wing with the endure ruins of a vocabulary. I am filled with vocabulary visions, and take for up to allow in the black art of vocabulary in soundness.

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