Writers not writing in English I know only through translation. Of course, I know myself only through translation—that is, through my writing.
*
The Spring light’s
flashes as we drive past
transfigures the shut
windows so that even
the gray wall of the hospital’s
cancer wing strikes us
as beautiful.
*
The shipwrecked sailor on learning the primitive islanders’ language: “Learning their language was all the more difficult because of its rudimentary nature. It might have seemed to a casual observer that the language was invented according to the caprice of each individual speaker. Later I realized that we impose laws even on caprice just to give ourselves the illusion of knowledge.”
Definitely! Maybe all of us, though. Peeling the onion of what one knows—truly <i>knows</i>—leads pretty quickly to zero….
"Later I realized that we impose laws even on caprice just to give ourselves the illusion of knowledge."<br /><br />It's sort of what "language poets" do, eh?