on translation as spiritual practice

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Peter

“The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.” — Wittgenstein

The Spanish word quedar can be translated as to remain, to stay, to meet, to fit, to suit (as in Ese color te queda bien), to be located, to end up, to agree, or to be left with (as in Me quedan 20 euros).

One of those meanings is “to agree.” That English verb can be translated back into Spanish as estar de acuerdo, acordar, convenir, coincidir, aceptar, or, again, quedar.

One of those meanings is acordar. Rendered back in English, that verb can mean to agree, decide, or make an arrangement, or–if it’s in a reflexive form–to remember. In turn, “to decide” could be conveyed in Spanish by decidir (or decidirse), resolver, acordar or determinar.

I chose quedar because it has a famously wide range of meanings, a bit like rendre or tenir in French. But notice that each of the words that I’ve mentioned connects to a unique list of words in the other language. This is typical. Putting two languages together creates a pattern of intertwined connections, like an arabesque design.

When you study a language, you memorize foreign words as sets of distinct words in your home language. In a given context, quedar means one thing, such as “to stay” or else “to agree.” A translator should know–or look up–the full list of meanings for each word and must pick the best one for each sentence. Sometimes there is no single best choice.

But once you know the language reasonably well, a word no longer decomposes into several words in a different language. Now it covers its own space. Presumably (I don’t have good enough Spanish to know) each use of quedar carries an implicit trace of its whole range of meanings.

Todo pasa y todo queda, 
pero lo nuestro es pasar, 
pasar haciendo caminos, 
caminos sobre el mar. 

Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be. 
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea. 

Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912): XLIV

Here I’ve rendered the first line with the verbs “to pass” and “to stay,” but I had other choices. Pasar could mean to go through, to happen (¿que pasa?), to spend time, etc. And we have already seen the range of meanings for quedar. Its other senses are missing in the English word “stay,” but that verb has its own range of meanings, including to visit and to prevent something from happening. Those are absent in Machado’s original.

I chose “to pass” for several reasons, including the sonic resemblance to pasar as well as some vague sense of English allusions, such as “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes). I chose “to stay” as a single syllable that was a near-rhyme for “ways.” Translation is not only about matching words but also about syntax, rhythm, and sound.

Artificial Intelligence is good at translating prose. It generally chooses an appropriate equivalent for each word. Thanks to AI tools, I have been able to read articles in languages, such as Japanese, of which I know nothing. I have also developed a careful practice of asking Claude to list all the dictionary definitions of words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali, that interest me. I hope that viewing these lists gives me some sense of how the words work in their original languages, although I must look through that glass darkly.

What AI cannot do is give a person the experience of parsing the whole world a bit differently by beginning to think in a different language. In turn, that experience teaches us that anyone’s model of the world is limited and contingent, and much always remains beyond anyone’s grasp.

A language is a whole system of meanings. It allows us to work with the world, yet it coexists with other systems that present the world differently. Those other systems include not only human languages (which are, after all, rather similar and interconnected), but also other consciousnesses. To glimpse this plurality is to see our own world as if from beyond it.

In the detail from a 13th-century Persian mihrab that accompanies this post, each arabesque field could stand for a pair of intertwined human languages, but there are also fields across the boundaries formed by the Quranic calligraphy. And the whole mihrab is a threshold to the beyond.

Wittgenstein writes, “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische” (Tractatus 6:45). Acknowledging that this sentence could be translated in many ways, I will render it: “The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.”

It’s another way of saying that we make our highways on the sea.

See also: Machado’s Glory is Never What I’ve Sought and Highways on the Sea; paradigms of attention; why the humanities could never be automated; and thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition. Photo credit: detail of a mihrab from Kashan (1226) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Tangle

Posted on May 11, 2026 by Peter

“Snarled, knotted—these neurons got as tangled
As the hair on top. The living are snagged
In their own matted mess, they are this thatch.
Who, I ask you, can fix such a tangle?”

“A person. Ethical. Concentrating. 
Insightful. Methodical yet ardent.
Someone who has fully accepted this task.
This person can unravel the tangle.

“Desire, hatred, and ignorance fade
While you pay attention to untangling.
Name and form fade, and the gap is gone
Between wish and fact. Then: no more tangle.”

This is a loose rendition of Linked Discourses 1.23 from the Pali Canon (a dialogue between a troubled demigod and the Buddha). Buddaghosa presents an entire book, The Path to Purification (probably 5th century CE), as a commentary on the second verse of this poem. See also: “Tangled Beauty,” The Fetter, etc.

Sadness is a Light Kindled in the Heart

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Peter

In 1943, Hannah Arendt published an article entitled “We Refugees” in a Jewish-oriented New York magazine, Menorah Journal. Here she observes that her fellow exiles act like optimists in public, for they want to banish their terrors and assimilate to an optimistic American society. The exceptions are the ones who can’t maintain the appearance and “turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way.”

She says, “I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.”

Around the same time, she privately wrote a poem in her native tongue that I will translate–a little loosely–as follows:

Sadness is like a light that is lit in the heart,
Darkness, a glow that gives shape to our night.
We set the small lamp of sorrow alight
To find our way home through the night's darkest part.
It brightens the wood, city, street, and tree.
And one who has no home--blessed is he;
In his dreams, even so, he sees home right.

At first, I didn’t love “darkness is like a light” (Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein), because that just seems to be a contradiction. But I came to appreciate the idea that the darkness of a sad night brings a kind of illumination by revealing the past.

The original German is three rhymed couplets:

Die Traurigkeit ist wie ein Licht im Herzen angezündet, 
Die Dunkelheit is wie ein Schein, der unsere Nacht ergründet. 
Wir brauchen nur das kleine Licht der Trauer zu entzünden, 
Um durch die lange weite Nacht wie Schatten heimzufinden. 
Beleuchtet ist der Wald, die Stadt, die Strasse und der Baum. 
Wohl dem, der keine Heimat hat; er sieht sie noch im Traum.

Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses

Posted on January 12, 2026 by Peter

According to Edward Hirsh, “English poetry began with a vision.” He’s referring to “Caedmon’s Hymn,” probably the earliest surviving verse in Old English. It’s embedded in a story that Bede wrote around the year 730 CE. Seamus Heaney calls this story “the myth of the beginning of English sacred poetry.”

Bede tells of an exemplary monk of Whitby Abbey during the time when St. Hilda was its abbess. This monk’s poetry turned many toward God. Bede explains that Caedmon never learned from human beings to make poetry. In fact, during banquets, when “it was decreed that all should sing,” and the harp was about to be passed to him to take his turn, he would rise from the middle of the company and go to his own house.

One night, he fled the singing and went to the village stables to tend the cattle he was responsible for. He completed his chores, fell asleep, and dreamt of a figure who said, “Caedmon, sing me something.” He replied that he couldn’t sing; that’s why he had come home from the banquet. The dream-figure insisted that he sing about the “beginning of creatures.” Caedmon found himself singing a poem that he had never heard before in praise of the Creator.

Bede includes this poem in Latin, acknowledging that it loses its “beauty and dignity” in translation. However, thanks to medieval scribes who added the original to the margins of many Bede manuscripts, we have the Old English text.

When Caedmon awoke, he remembered the words, added “many more,” and sang them to the local reeve (a magistrate), who took him to see St. Hilda. She and the learned men of her abbey were impressed and began explaining various biblical narratives to Caedmon. He became a monk and turned Bible stories into the “best songs,” instructing and inspiring people to shun lives of crime and to love truth and good deeds.

Caedmon’s poem, ostensibly the oldest in English, is also an invitation to think about the origins and purposes of poetry in general and its connection to other kinds of work, other kinds of knowledge, and other creatures. Several modern poets have responded to these questions.

Denise Levertov writes as Caedmon, beginning:

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.

She imagines that Caedmon takes his inspiration from the physical beauty of the stable where he is most at home:

I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure.

Jean Beal focuses on Caedmon’s fear when the harp comes his way. She writes alliterative verse that hints at the Old English form, beginning: “Hearing the harp, like hearing my enemy’s horn ….”

Some critics have seen W.H. Auden’s “Anthem” as an echo of Caedmon’s song.

Seamus Heaney entitles his Caedmon poem “Whitby-sur-Moyola.” This place sounds like an English village, but the Moyola is a river in Ulster near where Heaney grew up. I think Caedmon reminds Heaney of his ancestors. In “Digging,” he writes of his father, “By God, the old man could handle a spade. / Just like his old man.” Working the soil becomes Heaney’s model for poetry: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

In “Whitby-sur-Moyola,” Heaney adopts the perspective of someone who can recall Brother Caedmon, now deceased. This narrator admires Caedmon as an agricultural laborer: “the perfect yardman, / Unabsorbed in what he had to do / But doing it perfectly, and watching you.” Caedmon had finished learning poetry: “He had worked his angel stint. He was hard as nails.” Although the monk had mastered this learned art, his inspiration always came from the stable:

His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he’d passed them through a sick beast’s water.
Oh, Caedmon was the real thing all right.

I’ll take a turn:

Caedmon

How do you tell people where it comes from,
This stuff you produce professionally,
These words that the young are told they must heed?
You know that somehow it started with work,
With loneliness, with silence and with fear.
First, you stood at a slight angle to life.
When it was your turn, you could only be
Like the warm silent beasts with steaming breath.
Then you found your voice, and the credit came.
They even began to give you the first turn.
Since you can't explain it, you make up a tale:
A dream in a stable when words just flowed. 
It’s no less true than other things you say.

The City, by Cavafy

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Peter

Constantine Cavafy wrote “The City” in 1894. This poem doesn’t speak for me or articulate feelings that I happen to hold. But it is a famous work that is difficult to render in other languages, particularly because the original is densely rhymed. I gave it a try:

You said: I will get out of here, I will leave.
Some other place will be better than here.
Here everything I write comes back as a jeer, 
And here my heart feels buried like a corpse.
Can my mind still bear what withers and warps?
Wherever I look, where I turn my eye,
I see black ruins from my life gone by.
Here, where time has dragged on without reprieve.

You will find no new places, no other coasts.
This city will follow you. You will return
To the same streets and quarters in turn.
In the same neighborhood, you will grow old.
You will turn white in this very household.
You will always arrive back at this station.
Stop hoping for any other destination.
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
Just as you ruined your life in this abode,
So you have ruined all the world’s outposts.

Last summer, I read a most of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, which is an homage to Cavafy and his city (Alexandria) and concludes with Durrell’s loose translation of this poem. However, I quit before the end because I didn’t like the characters and found the novel’s evocation of Alexandria fervent yet vague. I thought this remark by a character (not the narrator) rang too true: “Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character” (p. 125).

See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt, which begins “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly …”; and Istanbul melancholy. (Pamuk loves Cavafy’s “The City.”)

If the sky were seen for the first time

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Peter

Now give us your true mind, turn to reason.
A new thing is trying to reach your ears 
To reveal itself to you in novel forms.
But nothing is so simple that it is not
At first hard to believe, nor any marvel 
So great that we don’t soon forget our wonder.

The sky’s clear and pure color, so restrained,
The stars shining everywhere, the moon,
And the splendid brightness of the sun’s light— 
If all this were suddenly, for the first time,
Unexpectedly revealed to mortals,
What could be called more miraculous than this,
Not less than what nations had dared to believe?

Nothing, I think; this scene would compel wonder.
We’re so tired of seeing, we don’t care to look up
To the resplendent temples of heaven.
Stop being terrified by this novelty
Stop spitting reason out of your mind.
Rather weigh it with sharp judgment, and if it seems true
Give it assent, or, if not, fight against it. 

For the mind seeks reason, and the highest place 
Is infinitely beyond the walls of this world. 
What is there beyond, where the mind wishes to look,
Where the free-thrown spirit itself can fly?

This is an excerpt from Lucretius (2.1023-46), which I found because Montaigne quotes the second part of it in his essay “It is Madness to Base True and False on our Self-Confidence” (1.27). My translation of this Latin text. Stephen Batchelor also discusses this passage (in his translation) in The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press, 2020), p. 42.

The Day of My Life

Posted on July 21, 2025 by Peter

I wish I did not have that human wish,
The wish that today were a different day,
But the wish that pours forth in the song of a bird:
“May it be this same day, so may it be.”

No, a bird sings not to say but to be.
It grants a wish just by being heard.
I wish I didn’t want the day to stay
Or change. I should, like the bird, just be.

(Responding to Randall Jarrell’s “A Man Meets a Woman in the Street,” with Keats’ nightingale also in mind.)

Hannah Arendt: I’m Nothing but a Little Dot

Posted on May 22, 2025 by Peter

(Cincinnati) In 1947, Hannah Arendt wrote a short poem, “Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt,” which Samantha Rose Hill accurately and ably translates as “I am just a little point / no more than a spot. …”

I took more liberty to make this translation, imitating Arendt’s strong rhyme-scheme:

I’m nothing but a little dot
No bigger than that black spot,
The beginning of a square.

When I want to expand from there
I start to daub spots everywhere.
My pencil lead (or ink is worse)
Casts on everything my curse.

But--I am nothing but a dot,
Not even a very well-made spot,
Radiant as the start of squares.

I think this is a poem about writing. The middle verse describes someone like Hannah Arendt in the midst of a project, spreading argumentative words in every direction, cursing (or perhaps bewitching) her surroundings with her ideas. But she had started with a single mark. Sometimes she identifies more with that humble first dot than with her whole, ambitious project.

The third stanza almost repeats the first, with the crucial difference that a single geometrical square has become plural, and her little dot (Punkt) “shines” or is “resplendent” (prunkt). It may be humble, but it has potential.

In the original:

Ich bin ja nur ein kleiner Punkt 
nicht grösser als der schwarze 
der dort auf dem Papiere 
als Anfang zum Quadrate.

Wenn ich mich sehr erweitern will,
beginn ich sehr zu klecksen, 
mit Stift und Feder, Blei und Tint 
die Umwelt zu behexen.

Doch bin ich nur ein kleiner Punkt 
nicht einmal gut geraten, 
der auf den Papieren prunkt 
als Anfang zu Quadraten.

German text from What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill. See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt

This is beautiful, scolds the mind

Posted on April 21, 2025 by Peter

This is beautiful, scolds the mind,
Seeing the mind wandering.
It ransacks its lexicon to find
Other words, pondering
Lovely, rare, or perhaps sublime
As sounds with which to hold the mind
That skitters anxiously through time
And which the things in view remind
Of other things undone, unfixed.
Disapproving, the mind regards
Itself distracted, not transfixed.
The whole it had glimpsed: now in shards.
The mind a problem for the mind,
A solid door has shut behind.

intimations

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Peter

Small plants near the sea, I think, are naive.
They push their little roots down through the loam
As if they grew far from where the tides upheave.
They set out their ripening buds for bees
Never acknowledging gulls, fish, or foam--
As if they need not consider the fact
Of the water, impenetrably deep.
Their petals vibrate in the humid breeze
As if it's fine for a seedling to sleep
To the rattle of rocks and waves’ impact.
Why don't they hunch like a wind-blown tree?
Why don't they dread the presence of the sea?

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