Walking Patiently through the Infrared Sensors, Thinking: A Play
After “Buster Keaton’s Ride”
The Players (in order of appearance):
The Players (in order of appearance):
Mr. Chocolate
The Positives
Love
The Microphone
The Dead
Evil Chinese Lion
Joseph King
Tia
Skunks
The Audience
Sexy Drinks and Plants
Charlemagne’s Ghost
Smurfs
Henry Suso’s Ghost
Robot
Mr. Chocolate: Join our club!
(THE POSITIVES, eight vagrants, enter)
The Positives (leaving behind a fog shaped like Texas): Eight.
The Positives (leaving behind a fog shaped like Texas): Eight.
Mr. Chocolate: Everyone!
The Positives (opening the doors of various American cars): Please, John is happy alone.
(Each car is powered by an electrically charged rocket)
(LOVE watches from the center of the city, center stage. THE MICROPHONE
descends from the ceiling on a wire, announcing THE DEAD.)
The Dead: Look! The Evil Chinese lion!
(A dramatic saxophone provides an atmosphere. ENTER JOSEPH KING and TIA)
Joseph King: It smells like hay.
Tia: Make your way to the second step.
Joseph King: The Dead were killed April 12.
Tia: Do it while you’re bundled up.
Joseph King: Turn off the blue T.V.
(Individual sponge cakes are passed around THE AUDIENCE as THE DEAD transform their cars into tombs. They emerge as children and begin accounting for the furniture onstage, each with a clipboard. JOSEPH KING and TIA play softball while the city center trembles expectantly. LOVE releases little SKUNKS that scatter like opening parentheses across the stage. A cowboy lullaby begins playing and sounds exactly as it sounds. As THE MICROPHONE ascends, signs reading “Jennifer Cobos” and “The Sam Abraham Center” descend from the rafters. SEXY DRINKS AND PLANTS reach their roots beneath the stage.)
The Positives: A word cyclone.
(The saxophone music fades as THE DEAD begin a chant in the Pashto Language.
300 dried flower stems are tossed from their pockets onto the stage while THE
POSITIVES exclaim “Shit!” and “Fuck!”)
Joseph King: Here is Charlemagne’s little hat. It’s been lost six Easters.
Evil Chinese Lion: Foo!
(Handsome CHARLEMAGNE’S GHOST whistles and produces a lock. EVIL CHINESE LION begins telling a long story while SMURFS pull on each of its six feet. THE POSITIVES draw wave-shapes on the wall stage right until they are tired. HENRY SUSO’S GHOST materializes from a sack of rice and begins making noises like a fax machine. There is a shop with delicate fans jiggling in his mind.)
(Five of THE POSITIVES are robbed and cry tears the shape of Caracas.)
The Audience: EVERYTHING!
(Using a complex equation scratched on a blackboard, JOSEPH KING conjures a complex of temples bathed in moonlight and fills it with fish.)
Joseph King: I am the old king.
The Audience (aging): WE ARE THE FAVORITE FANS OF CHARLES AZNAVOUR!
(JOSEPH KING dials a pink telephone)
The Audience: TELL US WHO YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU CAME FROM!
The Audience: TELL US WHO YOU ARE AND WHERE YOU CAME FROM!
(JOSEPH KING rinses his hands three times in three basins from Madrid)
The Audience: WE WANT OUR MONEY BACK!
(LOVE dons a pair of curator’s gloves and throws cheese into the emptying seats.
CHARLEMAGNE’S GHOST plays “Pacheco Fans Himself” on the piano. He sings in
both Spanish and Portuguese. The theater is sensitive, alone, and almost empty.)
The Positives (aware): They will all have surnames meaning “God is gracious,” old king. They have all passed their driving tests, and have those skills at-hand for their journeys home.
(THE DEAD whisper the names of every audience member. THE MICROPHONE is
switched off politely as they exit to a party stage left.)
Robot: They are riding some large wave.
Evil Chinese Dragon (stepping slowly backwards): Please leave.
(Jealous of THE AUDIENCE’S new names, THE POSITIVES dub each other Alfonso,
and drive their cars for 22 years. They end up owning a ranch together and work the
land “for Heaven’s sake.”)
The Audience: WE WANT OUR MONEY BACK!
(LOVE dons a pair of curator’s gloves and throws cheese into the emptying seats.
CHARLEMAGNE’S GHOST plays “Pacheco Fans Himself” on the piano. He sings in
both Spanish and Portuguese. The theater is sensitive, alone, and almost empty.)
The Positives (aware): They will all have surnames meaning “God is gracious,” old king. They have all passed their driving tests, and have those skills at-hand for their journeys home.
(THE DEAD whisper the names of every audience member. THE MICROPHONE is
switched off politely as they exit to a party stage left.)
Robot: They are riding some large wave.
Evil Chinese Dragon (stepping slowly backwards): Please leave.
(Jealous of THE AUDIENCE’S new names, THE POSITIVES dub each other Alfonso,
and drive their cars for 22 years. They end up owning a ranch together and work the
land “for Heaven’s sake.”)
Evil Chinese Dragon (aware): We will spit on the old Presidents of countries and go to the opera.
(HENRY SUSO’S GHOST leads a procession of clergy through a field of strawberries. The air remaining in the theater evaporates. The ROBOT is awake above the corpse of JOSEPH KING.)
A Note on the Process
A Note on the Process
This “translation” project attempts to respond to Jack Spicer’s After Lorca by utilizing a system of invention that engages with Spicer’s concept of the poet-as-receiver. The static produced by each iteration mostly refuses the poet’s involvement in choosing the language, producing poems that are fundamentally received (via the process). “A really perfect poem,” as Spicer notes in one of his letters to Lorca, “has an infinitely small vocabulary.” To make the poems, I do the following:
1. I read each poem into an iPhone application called Dragon Naturally Speaking. This dictation software is used to turn speech into digital text. I switched the application’s language recognition to Spanish, so that any audio received is automatically assumed Spanish. The important thing here is that the input is Spicer’s English (literally dictated), and the output is garbled Spanish. An example of the resulting text, in the case of this translation, follows:
(Babas asesinan a su hijo a sus tumbas el segundo opción sofá es tu balance quien son softbol y subió jefes me siguen parece, sostengo que Nelson escribo centro porque es Esperanza ofrecido mensa a jueves cómo andas. Te parece poco se chingues nada abro paréntesis amo por sobre otra cosa que parece comprar nana eso parece cowboy como parece Cobos exacto soy Jennifer si nos vemos antes a dormir compadre faltan es Esteban se hay nombre es foco Abraham Center hacen a tomarse copas sexy)
2. I then take the text produced by Dragon Naturally Speaking and run it through Google Translate, asking the software to take the Spanish and turn it back into English. This step produces randomized arbitrary syntactic connections between the garbled Spanish words and produces garbled English. Here is the result, using the same selection of text, above:
(Babas murder their child to their graves the second option is your balance sofawho are heads up softball and I still think, argue that Nelson writing centerbecause it offered hope to Thursday mensa you walk.You think little skunkslove nothing open parenthesis over another thing that seems to buy cowboylullaby that sounds exactly as it sounds I'm Jennifer Cobos if we are to sleepbefore my friend left no name is Stephen Abraham Center is focused to takedrinks are sexy)
3. Before trying to make any sense in a draft, I focus on “enhancing” the English “translation.” For this step, I use various dictionaries (online and in-print) to find alternate English translations of the primary Spanish words from the original dictated Spanish text (here I focus on the verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.). During this step, I also research geographical/historical or other connotations that occur by chance in the original dictations. I use brackets to “enhance” or provide context for each of the words/language units in the translated English draft, and track where I find the information. For research about proper names and places, I typically use a simple Google searche and pull information at-random from the results. An excerpt of the example text at this stage:
(Babas [baba- small sweet spongecake, usually filled with raisins and soaked in rum. Polish/French..literally referring to the old women who made and carried them] murder their child to their graves [OR tombs] the second [the latter] option is your balance [economically: a balance sheet] sofa who are heads [the leader of something; bosses/managers] up [climbed/went up] softball and I still think, argue that Nelson writing center [downtown/heart] because it offered hope[given; ALSO: expectancy?] to Thursday mensa [mess/refectory] you walk [como andas: how you walk]. You think little skunks [also: derogatory- fucking kidding] love [or master] nothing open parenthesis over another thing that seems to buy cowboy lullaby [also: a nanny, or familial- nana] that sounds exactly as it sounds I'm Jennifer Cobos [“12 people named Jennifer Cobos in the U.S.” (names.whitepages.com)]…
4. The drafting of my version of each poem attempts to collect the nuances in the Spanish and English versions, leaving intact as much of the original dictated text’s language and syntax as possible. To begin, I read Spicer’s original poem as a guide for tone/form/sound, and then work through multiple versions of each line/group of lines. A truer explanation of this stage of the process might be gleaned from a reading of Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” and is futile, but I hope that readers see the echoes of each layer of text in the “translation” that I ultimately end up with. Here’s the finished text of the example used throughout this explanation:
(Individual sponge cakes are passed around THE AUDIENCE as THE DEAD transform their cars into tombs. They emerge as children and begin accounting for the furniture onstage, each with a clipboard. JOSEPH KING and TIA play softball while the city center trembles expectantly. LOVE releases little SKUNKS that scatter like opening parentheses across the stage. A cowboy lullaby begins playing and sounds exactly as it sounds. As THE MICROPHONE ascends, signs reading “Jennifer Cobos” and “The Sam Abraham Center” descend from the rafters. SEXY DRINKS AND PLANTS reach their roots beneath the stage.)
The transition of each word through the various processes gives it a history that is entirely private within each poem, and allows for a system of connections to ambulate in complete originality. The poem derives its own language and symbolic system.
The end result of this process is essentially a mistranslation (as Paul Legault has called it); something misheard or dreamt. The poems, then, mirror Spicer’s own imagined correspondence with Lorca, and attempt to answer his voice with another.