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    Untranslatable
    Untranslatable
    Untranslatable
    Ebook115 pages40 minutes

    Untranslatable

    By Julia Klatt Singer

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Untranslatable is a book-length collection of poems that all start from an untranslatable word—a word found in other languages that we do not have in English. The poems written from the words capture how this word is or can be lived, defined from a natural and imaginative world perspective. “Lovers of language take delight in those wonderful words which refuse to succumb to literal translation. Untranslatable captures the imaginative essence of these words and our underlying sense that, after all, nothing slips our understanding.” –Marcia Peck, writer and cellist in the Minnesota Orchestra
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNorth Star Press of St. Cloud
    Release dateMar 1, 2015
    ISBN9780878398287
    Untranslatable
    Author

    Julia Klatt Singer

    Julia Klatt Singer’s stories and poems have appeared in over five dozen journals and magazines. She is the poet in residence at Grace Neighborhood Nursery School in Minneapolis,  co-author of Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul, Coffee House Press, 2003 and author of the chapbook, In the Dreamed of Places, Naissance Press, 2011. Her first book of poetry, A Tangled Path to Heaven, was published by North Star Press in 2013. She has co-written fifteen songs with composer Tim Takach and composer Jocelyn Hagen. Ms. Singer lives in Minneapolis.

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      Book preview

      Untranslatable - Julia Klatt Singer

      Funktionslust

      Ayurnamat

      (Inuktitut) The philosophy that there is no reason to worry about the things that can’t be changed.

      When you appear in my dream

      talking, as if I’d been there all along

      I hand you a knife, don’t even have to ask

      if you’d like to help. We are twenty-five stories;

      from the ground, into the evening,

      making dinners, watching the snow.

      Always with you there is falling

      snow, from a window that reminds me

      of a bed, there, where your eyes rest,

      there, where I dream,

      as the snow swirls and spells out

      all the things we’ve left

      unsaid.

      Snjór

      (Icelandic) One of the 6,243 words identified to name the snow or its appearance.

      The silence of snow,

      like the silence of you

      is what I wake to

      blinding white

      and falling.

      Start the day

      By throwing away

      words;

      scarlet, indigo, then

      cerulean, mango

      who needs them

      in this kind of cold?

      Take apart my name

      letter by letter

      toss each one to the crows.

      Bury me in white,

      bury me away

      like your heart.

      What animal owns it now?

      What kind of spring

      will it take

      to trigger your blood

      to run

      honey & sweet.

      Waldeinsamkeit

      (German) The feeling of being alone in the woods.

      First, I must tune out the opera

      my husband is listening to on the radio, now

      the applause—it sounds genuine,

      but from this distance (both geographical and of time)

      there is something hollow, something less than

      true as it thunders in our living room.

      Tonight I don’t need the German

      or the tenor or the tiptoeing violins.

      Or the clicking nails of our dog

      as he walks from room to room in search

      of a register that is warm, to claim and own.

      Then there is the wind that twists

      the porch chimes into a frenzied song. Ahab

      too, who spent most of his years

      watching the Sound from my in-laws’ verandah

      now fights the Canadian cold fronts,

      his wooden back clattering against the house.

      It is the right kind of darkness, moonless

      like walking under trees thick with canopy.

      I imagine the woods, and how I’d walk through them

      but the soprano is still singing

      just hit her high note—

      I may be alone in my wishing her quiet

      but I wish it anyway. Put her in a real woods

      night trees, charcoal silhouettes

      drawn against an inky sky.

      They band together

      a chorus of trees, hush

      the wind (the soprano too)

      let winter still and cold

      settle in. In deepest winter

      let me walk,

      a small lit thing,

      ever so quietly through

      the tracks of something else’s making.

      Yugen

      (Japanese) An awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and mysterious to be described.

      I set the oven to self-cleaning

      so that I can at least smell heat.

      Minus fourteen outside, the house wears

      the chill of winter, in its fabric

      and in its seams.

      I am no different,

      Winter is my bones;

      my thoughts are frost

      my breath, a cloud

      my heart, a buried sun.

      Culaccino

      (Italian) The mark left on a table by a cold glass.

      The first one I

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