I know I’ve been a little quiet of late but I’m trying to get back on track. Had a very busy July, with work, and a social life which seemed to spring from nowhere, and now I’m planning for an exciting couple of weeks InterRailling in Europe. But I will get a few posts done before hand. This one included.

So here it is, my next stop on the obscure poetry train, translation poetry!

I got the idea from a poetry evening I went to attended by Ross Sutherland. If you’re not familiar with Sutherland, you must check out some of his work, he’s brilliant, and absolutely hilarious.

The idea is to take a poem, and feed it through a piece of translation software until the original meaning is lost in translation errors. His manuscript National Language can be found here.

I had a play around with Bing translator and one of my favourite poems – Rudyard Kipling’s The Way through the Woods . I didn’t run it through hundreds of times like Sutherland did, nor did I take words out in between translations and manipulate it in that way. I ran it through about 10 times, and then tidied the text up. If I have more time I might try following Sutherland’s process a little more carefully, but I’m still quite happy with the result I got from this one.

This is the original:

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

And here is my mistranslated version:

They are out of the way, Les.
More than 70 years ago.
Gone back to the weather and the rain.
You would never know now
That once a forest was in the way.
Trees were planted
Based on the Bush administration;
And the heath’s pale sea anemones.
Only a custodian can see the Paluomakefu school.
The badgers do not.
At the end of the summer night,
A trout pond loops in the air conditioning.
And the Colleague Otter?
Well, he does not like the woods.
Therefore, some are searching.
Listen to your horse,
Dress pink,
Ride.
Solitodis Dim.
They know.
Take the old forest road.
There is no forest.

As always I had great fun playing around with this, although it did take me a little while to find some software which was unsophisticated enough to sufficiently obscure the meaning (sorry Bing). I would suggest trying this method out yourself if you’ve enjoyed any of the other methods I’ve tried out.

Once again, any suggestions for future blog posts are much appreciated 🙂