Words Can Get You in All Kinds of Trouble
KarmenRose
Words are tricky things, aren’t they? You say one thing and it’s heard as something else. A never ending frustration, it seems, explaining what we mean time and again, using the words that betray us to tell others what we see and hear and feel. A word is not a vision, nor is it a sound, nor a feeling. Sometimes it can come close, but the translation always must lose something in its journey from point to point. That is the nature of translation.
In the poem “Cartographies of Silence†Adrienne Rich writes,
A conversation begins speaker of the so-called common language feels as if powerless, as if up against
with a lie. And each
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
a force of nature
And that’s it, isn’t it? Always saying (and for that matter, writing) what you almost mean, because the words you have don’t quite get you to the place you want to be.
Yet Rich closes her poem with this:
if from time to time I long to turn like the Eleusinian hierophant for return to the concrete and everlasting world are these words, these whispers, conversations
holding up a simple ear of grain
what in fact I keep choosing
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
Words are tricky things, yes, and they certainly can get us into all kinds of trouble, but in the end they must suffice, for indeed, they are all we have. And it usually turns out that they are enough.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, jamelah and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
