“On Beatification Day, Ania and I were simply strange children in a world at once new and familiar. Telling, then, that Nowy Świat, when translated literally, means New World. The centuries-old buildings appeared now as they never had before, all fancied up in their paradoxically papal saturnalia. I may have been the foreigner, but this vista was new to both of us.”
My short travel piece ‘Beatification’ has just been featured in the Winter 2014 issue of Cardinal Sins, an arts journal out of lower Michigan. On the theme of translation and the genesis of ‘Beatification’: “I wrote this piece following a short trip to Europe one spring. After several days traveling across Poland, my language skills had become frayed and almost useless. I’d begun living in translation, and found that we inhabit our words like we do our own minds, and a translation – even a poor one – can have tremendous influence on the world around us.”
Leave a Reply