Many Worlds Theory

Here’s another Oulipo poem for you.  Can you determine its unusual construction?

Come eat!

There is hay.

Net says, “red dice”;

Dude hesitate, kills mate.

He pagan, I paid.

Without sin, leer to read!

Read Full Post »

This is a follow-up to the last post, in which I “composed” three poems in some nefarious way.

All of these poems were “written” with the help of Google Translate.  I simply took the source material in English, cut-and-pasted into Google Translate and then cycled through 3 others languages before returning to English.  The result is just the original poem in English again, but twisted linguistically.

To illustrate the process, let’s take a single sentence from Poe’s “Conqueror Worm”:

And the angels, all haggard and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy “Man,”

Its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Let’s go to German:

Und die Engel, die alle hager und blass,

Aufstand, Enthüllung, bekräftigen

Dass das Spiel der Tragödie ist “Mensch”

Sein Held, der Eroberer Wurm.

And now to Turkish:

Ve melekler, tüm bitkin ve solgun,

Ayaklanma, meydana çıkarma, teyit

Oyun trajedi “Adam” olduğunu

Onun kahraman, Fatih Worm.

And then to Greek:

Και οι άγγελοι , όλοι εξαντληθεί και χλωμό ,

Εξέγερση , αποκαλυπτήρια , επιβεβαίωσε

Τραγωδία παιχνίδι ” Man” είναι

Ήρωά του , Πορθητή Worm.

Finally we get back to English:

And the angels, all exhausted and pale,

Uprising, unveiling confirmed

Tragedy “Man” game is

Hero, Conqueror Worm.

This particular stanza is not much worse for the wear.  The only editorial choices I made were what languages to phase into, along with a bit of cleaning-up of the punctuation.  The process is much like the “telephone game” (“Chinese whispers” in other countries) where a phrase gets distorted gradually, like a Philip Glass melody, until it no longer resembles the original in any way.

I’d be interested to see other people’s attempts at Google Translate poetry.

Read Full Post »