Thursday, July 30, 2015

Translation prompt--great classroom idea

During one of our sessions, Cat gave us  "translation prompt." Basically, she gave us several poems that were written in other languages. Based on the appearance of the words, as well as syllabication patterns, the idea is to write an English "translation." The activity was incredibly challenging for me, but I think it would work well for students. I kept trying to match up words closely and was getting frustrated. I think students would, however, be very open to this kind of writing activity.

These are some of the poems that Cat gave us.



I attempted to "translate" the top poem and came up with these lines:

Asking for happiness
May be dangerous
Now, giving of amulets   (that's the line where I gave up b/c my poem turned wacko)

I tried translating the same poem a second time and had a little more success.

Asking for happiness
is my daring act.
I'm not going to understand
your death or missing you.
Now that I've imagined living,
I ache to persuade you.   (Still not the most solid piece of work, but again, prompts are not meant to act as the "be all, end all." Prompts are just another way to get "into" a poem and begin building one). 

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