Matt Thomas: WHAT'S FOUND IN TRANSLATION • Writing Tips

Matt Thomas
What’s Found in Translation

If you’re feeling poetically uninspired, try translating a poem from a language that you read imperfectly. The process of looking up words you don’t know and then determining the poetic intention from the direct translation is fun and stimulates the writing part of your brain without the pressure of creating something from scratch.

For example, the epigraph of my upcoming book is, “Le moutonnement des haies / C’est en moi que je l’ai,” a quote from Jean Wahl’s Poemes. A direct translation is “The Sheepling of the hedges / In me that I have it.” The colloquial translation would be, “The frothing/waving hedges / I keep inside me,” which I translated to, “The woolly hedges / I keep inside me,” playing on “Sheepling.”

In his ‘Open Work,’ Umberto Eco describes reading as a collaborative process between text and reader who ‘rewrites’ as they read. According to Eco, the text is never explicit, always a ‘lazy machine’ that requires the participation of the reader to fill in the gaps in meaning. This theory has always made practical sense to me because I absolutely rewrite everything I read while I read it.

Translation is reading from one language and writing into another, practicing the poetic process while mimicking it. I’m an unabashed Derrida fanboy (I recently realized that my instant collegiate infatuation with Derrida may have had something to do with a pre-existing idolization of Brian Setzer: they have the same hair). Derrida posits that translation is more about what is ‘not there’ than ‘there.’ Absence is central to the idea and practice of Derrida’s textual deconstruction. He writes that ‘there is nothing outside of the text,’ including the author’s intentions.

When you begin a translation you’re staring at broken meaning, maybe no meaning at all, aside from recognizable letters on a page. Poetry is also very much about what is not there, there in the breaks.

When I write a poem I’m translating the imperfect data from my senses into a more specific language, one that is altogether mine. Another favorite critic, Helen Cixous, sees translation as a mode of writing that creates a new language. Which I would say is just like writing poetry.

Matt Thomas is a smallholder farmer, engineer, and poet. His most recent work can be found in Cleaver Magazine and Kestrel. Disappearing by the Math, a full-length collection, was published by Silver Boy in 2024. Cicada, Dog & Song, a second full-length collection, will be published by Serving House Books in 2026. A third collection, Foxy Love: All American Poems will be published by Kelsay Books in early 2027. He lives with his family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.