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The poetics and politics of refraction | Jacket2

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In some ways, all language is errant translation. Language wanders from its intended assignments, language is slippery, and what makes the desire to communicate so beautiful is its desperation and inevitable failure; it revels in something basic and intrinsic to humanity, a primal longing, like Sisyphus and his round boulder, Wu Gang and his moon tree. In some ways this is every writer’s and artist’s ongoing work: to continuously rename the world anew, and in this renaming we attempt to grasp it while also giving it up to the ether. Tell all the truth but tell it slant is the famous dictate from Emily Dickinson, and whether intrinsically or in aesthetic pursuit, language as a project of translation becomes refraction: never a perfect transference of concepts but instead a mediated articulation of the world. The color, shape, and texture of meaning travels along wavering, unstable trajectories. Poets and artists navigate by way of this refraction, intentionally turning their glances ask

In some ways, all language is errant translation. Language wanders from its intended assignments, language is slippery, and what makes the desire to communicate so beautiful is its desperation and inevitable failure; it revels in something basic and intrinsic to humanity, a primal longing, like Sisyphus and his round boulder, Wu Gang and his moon tree. In some ways this is every writer’s and artist’s ongoing work: to continuously rename the world anew, and in this renaming we attempt to grasp it while also giving it up to the ether. Tell all the truth but tell it slant is the famous dictate fr

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