Cole Swensen

There’s a cult—relatively unknown but actually quite numerous—of adherents to the intentionally untranslatable, founded upon the principle that if it could be translated, why write it? In short, if something can be translated, that’s proof that the writer is working, not in language, but rather in idea, concept, image, etc., and therefore the work may well lack the immediacy for which many poets strive. This is especially true of titles. There are many of us who only translate books with untranslatable titles—otherwise you’ve got nothing to start with.

A ship is, by definition, something slipping out of fog, and oddly more visible than a vessel less veiled. More shored in dim windows, it’s more nuance and happenstance, as if more of the story were buried in memory, and thus lit with it and trembling. A ship is, in fact, the shape of memory itself, and, remembering itself, suddenly thinks what a long way off it seems, and yet at every slight lightening of the fog, it deflects the thought and thus is still coming toward.

The fog extends into linguistics, making it difficult to say whether it’s really a ship or more of a boat or a ferry or a yacht—the ambiguity embeds, even enshrouds, and the woman in the foreground shifts her shawl, thinking that all we are is largely veiled, though it may be more apparent in seaports, where the mist lifts the seawall that she’s sitting on—which turns out to be a ferry after all, and already underway.