Intro Post: Mok.

[lilmoka]

Hello! I'm Mok and I'll be your poetree host for this week ♥

I am a reader who will devour a book per day, more if she has the possibility to do so. I occasionally write short stories and sometimes poetry, too.

For the longest time, I saw poems as something terribly boring my teachers would inflict me (and sometimes even require I learn them by heart, oh no!), not as a pleasure. Strangely, I didn't have this problem with other kinds of fiction, I was enthusiastic when I had to read novels for school. Not so much for writing essays about them, though...

Anyway, I've started reading poetry again in my late teens. I grew fond of English poets like Wordsworth and Whitman, French poets such as Rimbaud and Verlaine, Spanish speaking authors including Vargas Llosa and García Márquez and many, many others.

The thing is, I am deeply fascinated by languages. I'm Italian and sadly not many people outside my country speak this wonderful language. I don't know what it's like to go abroad and be able to speak with strangers in my native tongue. That's one of the reasons that pushed me to learn English, to communicate with other people.

Nowadays I can speak more or less fluently four languages (Italian, English, French and Spanish) and I try to use them as much as I can. My favourite practice method is helping tourists order food in restaurants ;)

But how does this guilty pleasure translate (ha!) in real life? What does it have to do with poetry and why am I dumping this information on you? The answer is simple: I try to insert foreign languages in my life as much as I can, and a huge part of my life is made up of books. See where this is going?

In short, this week I'm going to talk about poetry and languages, how reading a poem in different languages can change its meaning in my mind, how some things may get lost in translation and my favourite poetic genre: multilingual poems.

I hope we're going to have fun!

Poll #10393 Kudos?

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Comments

[alee_grrl]

As someone who only knows a few words in languages other than English (my goal is to at least master one other language, if not more; there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the universe for all the things I want to learn) I am very impressed by folks that can fluently speak more than two. I look forward to reading your posts on multilingual poetry. :)

[lilmoka]

Late answer is late XD

Thank you, sweetie! <3

[untonuggan]

It's interesting, because most of my experience with classroom foreign languages is with translating poetry. I made the perhaps not-so-useful-in-hindsight-but-fun-at-the-time decision to take Latin in high school, so rather than learning to speak a language we spent hours translating Virgil, Ovid, Catullus, and other poets. I wanted to burn copies of the Aeneid at times, but it really gave me an appreciation for how different figures of speech could be used because you have to spend so much time with a poem when you're translating a poem. (At least, I did, because I could never remember vocabulary words so I was always looking things up in the dictionary.) It really makes you savor it a little bit more.

Other than that, I understand a fair bit of conversational Arabic and Spanish because I know a lot of people who speak those languages. I wish I spoke four languages! Kudos to you on that.

[lilmoka]

I studied Latin too but I hated it. Now I'm sad I couldn't appreciate it and sometimes I even think I should give it another try. Maybe one day I will, who knows!

That's quite cool! Aww, thank you <3