"You, if no one else, will condemn with your tongue the erosion each disappointment brings"
-Tino Villanueva, "You, If No One Else"

This week, I accomplished one of the general milestones--I discussed translating Catullus with Dr. Patrick, my chosen mentor. I'm going to go in one morning next week to have a longer discussion with him. In addition to this, I want to check out some of the books he has in his classroom.

I've made good headway with Catullus. I've been perfecting translations of Catullus 48, 81, and 99, all centered on Iuventius. I thought I loved him before, but I appreciate his work more and more with every poem I read. However, it hasn't been easy. 

Sometimes a phrase or a line will have a certain beautiful symmetry in Latin, for example, which is impossible to replicate in English. There's a construction of "usque...usque" which can only be translating clumsily using words like "keep" and "still," clunky at best. Also, why do the Romans have so many words meaning "sweet "and so many sobriquets? Maybe because Latin is the first Romance language. English, meanwhile, is coming up short in that department. 

I'm hesitant to hit up the thesaurus. I think the best thing to do is have Dr. Patrick take a look at my translations and give me some tips, because there's a point at which you hit a roadblock with honing something, and I've hit mine with Catullus 48, at least.

The Shakespearean sonnet is finished and could use some editing, but I'm quite proud of it. The Neruda sonnet is more difficult. The more deeply I feel something, the more difficult it is to excavate it, and when I do, it's all but impossible to buff it to a clean shine. My emotions feel rough-hewed around the edges, but not with the raw appeal of Neruda. That's what makes him Neruda and me an amateur, I suppose. I haven't given up on it yet, though.

Coffeehouse is coming up on Tuesday. As an NEHS member, I'm required to bring something to share. I do truly want to read out "bring me back in your bucket of sand." I've been steeling myself for this for weeks. That won't stop me from being a nervous wreck when I get up on that stool, but I think writing this down will force me to be accountable to it. I was so confident in it before, though, and now I just keep going over it again and again, changing "fat" to "voluminous," "scrap" to "fragment," then fretting over whether I've ruined the tone.

I get up at around 5:30 every morning. This week, rather than try for one of the tough themed poems, I'm going to set myself a challenge of another kind (in addition to climbing the mountain of my fear of public performance at Coffeehouse). Every morning this week, from Monday to Friday, I will write one poem. Every afternoon, I will edit that poem. My biggest problem with this project has been pushing myself to produce content without second-guessing myself, and this will compel me into it if nothing else. 

We'll see how well this goes. Fingers crossed that I'm not so much of a zombie when I first wake up this week that everything is just an ode to brains.