Jason Weiss
Perpetual Force Fields
Tinta regada
10 – mayo de 2026
What to make of such acquisitions? Can we take them to the playground?
A format for publishing foreign poetry, bilingual books propose a curious circuitry. Back and forth we read, and in that stretching of mind we discover unexpected clues about our own tongue and another, amid the wonders of what carries over. Besides, there are always pockets of usage that throw us for a spin. The practice of this stereoscopic reading alerts us to patterns, word formations, syntactical divergences, and if we hang on, a sort of knowledge accrues. When I read Pierre Joris’s lifelong versions of Paul Celan’s collected poems in this way, I felt I was learning German, which I had never studied.
What to make of such acquisitions? Can we take them to the playground? The benefits gained tend less toward survival than enrichment, the better to fortify us in that vast interzone abuzz with a multitude of tongues, where each loosens its moorings, its fixed identity, and mingles unpredictably with its neighbors. As we know, there are many ways to say essentially the same thing; every phrasing with its particular weights and balances, its rhythms and nuances. But never mind the endless possibilities of expression: in the orchards of sense, even sense may change its meaning over time. Three little words suffice to illustrate, as Edmond Jabès has noted: “I love you” does not mean the same today as it did yesterday, or when the two of you first met, in light of intervening experiences. All these subtle shiftings suggest that the tongues we think and speak and write in, the very words themselves, vibrate in place, iridescent with potential shadings, underlying the language we wield consciously.
Where we are familiar with the foreign tongue in certain bilingual pages, our reading can hardly resist, intermittently, trying out variations. Our inner ear understands given passages its own way, which may not align with what the translator has come up with, and so at moments we are almost hearing alternate versions simultaneously until ours withdraws, reluctantly, in favor of the pages before us. Our fleeting versions may in fact hew closer to the original intent of such lines, on the wing of well-attuned or misdirected instincts, according to our own attentions to the tongues at play. At any rate, those idiosyncratic soundings also become part of the reading, as it helps color what we draw from that well. Just as every reader brings distinctive sensitivities to their perception of a text, bilingual pages complicate the matter, engaging new consonances and dissonances. And though we eventually turn the page, this heightened field of action, while lending some clarity, serves to deepen our unsettlement in like measure.
Lately, I have been reading Christopher Winks’s nimble translations of the Cuban poet Lorenzo García Vega, Labyrinth (2025). The poet’s tonal leaps and madcap turns are taken at full throttle in the new versions, and naturally enough, sometimes I’m not quite sure where we are. As with any bilingual edition, in going through the original there are lines where my mind veers onto other tracks, soon pulled back to the printed version. But the final phrase of one poem, “Tu voz” (“Your Voice”), on page 96, “donde ya no se copian nuestros sueños,” is rendered as “where our dreams are no longer copied.” In Spanish and other romance languages, the reflexive form of a verb can be read as passive or active, depending on context; often, one is not required to choose—except in translating. This was an instance where, as a reader, my mind refused to yield to the published translation there on the opposite page. Each time I return to those lines, I cannot help hearing it internally as “where our dreams no longer copy each other.” It just makes more sense to me dynamically, with all that’s gone before in the poem. And yet, I understand the translator’s choices and find no easy solutions otherwise. Here is where the weights and balances affect everything. In the long winding sentence that leads up to that last phrase, we already have an “each other” that would be awkward to avoid: “… in order to place both of us, though we are facing each other, with a hidden face, with an unreal voice…” The Spanish uses different words, both common, for “facing” and “face,” whereas in English the one word sounds most natural. So, to repeat “face” yet again (“though we are face to face”) wouldn’t work; besides, after “place” a few words earlier, the sound would clang in our ear.
Like the translator, I as a reader cannot resolve this tension. The facing pages of two languages that purportedly say more or less the same thing turn out to be rather, despite appearances, an unquiet force field. They postulate anything but an equation fixed into place. Imagine an entire book of such combustible pairings, perpetually sounding back and forth. When readers venture far enough among those alternate voicings, how do we manage not to hear it all?
