a mouth stumbles
over anguished English --
words
clumsily tip
never to take flight
Every time I hear myself speak in English, I just hate it. It is not my human voice but rather a mechanically translated one. It is not simply that my ears hate my mouth, or that my mouth tries to irritate my ears. It is because, in the strain of translating a Chinese word into its English equivalent or vice versa, the spontaneity and natural quality of my speech are lost. In the throes of translating, I feel that I'm falling out of the tightly knit fabric of emotional vocabulary into the hole-filled net of linguistic signifiers. Stuck in this dark and chaotic situation, I have become a stranger to myself, a person who lives on the edge between the world of his own and that of the foreigners he has just joined.
over anguished English --
words
clumsily tip
never to take flight
Every time I hear myself speak in English, I just hate it. It is not my human voice but rather a mechanically translated one. It is not simply that my ears hate my mouth, or that my mouth tries to irritate my ears. It is because, in the strain of translating a Chinese word into its English equivalent or vice versa, the spontaneity and natural quality of my speech are lost. In the throes of translating, I feel that I'm falling out of the tightly knit fabric of emotional vocabulary into the hole-filled net of linguistic signifiers. Stuck in this dark and chaotic situation, I have become a stranger to myself, a person who lives on the edge between the world of his own and that of the foreigners he has just joined.
May 2009 issue of Word Catalyst
