This was my order as well. I was thinking about stars, so I loved that you came to the same conclusion when thinking about flowers. I guess our theme is "humble beginnings, intensive life, and then death." God, we are so insightful!
Ghostly bright nascent, fresh fulsome, no thinking involved. But immediately I was thinking, and resisting: how could I do this with just adjectives, how could there be meaning in it. I see that many of you did find meaning in this string. I can learn from this. I think that when I am reworking sentences in my writing I am like a copy editor--"which one is most correct or rhythmically sounds best"--but the question here is different. Maybe I can remember this in writing stories.
My insight is that in my own voice, I use a lot of adjectives--maybe overuse them. So I did not turn any of the words into verbs (freshen, brighten, etc.), or adverbs (brightly, fulsomely). So it was easy to craft several sentences using the words as adjectives. Then George has me thinking about economy and I know I can look for and find adjectives and descriptions to eliminate and improve the flow of my sentences. Fulsome is tricky because it can have very different connotations.
Yes, I totally love this order you've found. (Writers: making order from disorder in order to make meaning of the world.) It's the evolution of anything, really. A flower, yes. Also, love. Friendship. A casserole. A sunset. Love it.
Thank you for focusing on the important creative work of translators. We are too often overlooked.
I just read a book review of a recent Eng translation of a novel, and the name of the publishing co was mentioned but the name of the translator was not. 🙄
And then I read this post and felt better. Looking forward to the next post too.
Seems from your post Gigi that there two distinct categories of overlooked translators: those who are above the line, so to speak, and credited and, then, those who are below the line and uncredited.
In having 'My First Goose' on the anvil to work on in our wordsmiths' forges we seem to have an original text by a Russian writer the translation of which has been a significant contribution to the building the careers of a number of notable 'above the line, credited' translators.
As a linguist, I've lots of experience in how slippery translations are. Perennial problem. Take a language not related to English, one with complex words (maybe a nice North American indigenous language with lots of stuff on the verb) and get a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss -without the translation into English- and try to figure out what it means.
I was also thinking about word order here and how some languages, like French, have a fairly rigid syntax while others are far looser, like Russian, which is what Babel wrote in. The non-rigid languages have the potential to achieve a greater flow and lyricism -- or clunking awkwardness, or breathless, sprinting cadences -- since you have so much more freedom to arrange your words according to sound. But capturing this in translation can be a huge headache. In my own work (I do some Estonian translation) half the battle is putting the bits of proper English syntax into some sort of flow that mimics the original.
And what chance that what you've figured will turn out to be what a peer translator will have figured? I'm no linguist, alas, but I am enjoying what seem - in the case of translations of Isaac Bebel's 'My First Goose' what seem to be rather, and richly, enigmatic variations on interpretation of words, phrases and so sentences and possibly, even, paragraphs.
Yes! Translations are closer to interpretations than equivalencies. Context matters, all you mention. I work with people whose languages and cultures are different from Euro-western ones. The, maybe natural, tendency is to work with English as a kind of metalanguage and meta culture. We can't avoid working from where we are, what we know. But it requires me paying attention to the original context and content. And structure. Sometimes structure impedes translation.
Like in the many comments somewhere in these streams, more credit is due credit to the talent of translators.
Went to a conference once on translation. One speaker - not a literary translator, but all are equally neglected - told of how she'd been asked to 'copy this text into English, please'.
It's an odd state of affairs, not just that translators' work and contribution to widening access to literature has not been acknowledged as a matter of course (which is hard to understand), but that Pan MacMillan have taken firm steps to redress such an oversight (which is hareder still to understand).
I thought, 'Oh, no! Their order is so much better!' I didn't work with sounds, but more with meaning: fresh, bright, nascent, ghostly, fulsome. I keep thinking the fulsome sticks out like a swollen thumb and I couldn't work into another order--fresh and bright, nascent and ghostly, dump the fulsome...
I always have to look it up, so same for me. It's like "bemused." It sounds like it should mean something different. But someone could deploy it well. That is just not me.
Hah, I kinda like "fulsome." I associate it with an older era. So when a contemporary author uses it, it draws attention to itself in an ironic way. For example,
“I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.” - Neil Gaiman
That's fine, and fulsome fits beautifully into that list of adjectives, which all attach usefully to 'praise', even reaching a climax. Lovely quote! This, for me, is exactly why it doesn't fit the list George gave us, all the rest of which seem to suggest physical, not abstract qualities. I've heard it mis-used so often by news casters, when what they mean is 'full/fully', that I just don't choose to use it any more - except following Gaiman, of course!
Doh! All this time I've been thinking that "fulsome" meant to the nth degree, as in the most fully fullest manifestation of a thing, like a flower in full bloom. But now that I've looked it up in the dictionary, I realize it means excessive and overblown, so I guess I'm just like those uninformed news casters. I am truly embarrassedsome.
Don't be, Lisa - the mistake is so common that it's shortly about to become 'usage', I suspect, to the chagrin of many of those who hate it when some useful word is misused, appropriated, and then lost. I had to look it up myself, to make sure my semantic structure wasn't wrong - and this time it wasn't!
So (among other things), i'm a speech therapist, which means I also studied sounds and linguistics, etc. One thing that happens when you string words together is that they feel more natural sometimes due to the placement of your tongue/teeth and the amount of air sliding between your lips, etc. Think also in terms of long vowels and short vowels, repetitions, word length, etc. So. "Fresh, fulsome" works better than "fulsome, fresh," because the following word you've chosen (nascent) is closer in tongue movement to the ending sound of fulsome. Your lips close to make the "m" sound and then you move to the "n" of nascent, also made in the front of the mouth. "Bright" would be better here as it begins with the lips together, just as fulsome ends with the lips together so there is a flow there. But the fact of the single syllable along with the long vowel in "bright" may not play as well to your ear. "Ghostly, Bright" both have the harder, long vowels in them, and ending with "bright" provides a nice "boom." So I do like the order you have given the words here! In my mind, they are offset like a poem:
Hey, I'm a (retired but still working) speech pathologist too. And I loved my school psychs. I agree about people working in the schools. And I totally agree with what you said about the sounds.
Now that we got 2 speech paths and a psych, we just need an Occupational Therapist and a Special Education Teacher. Then Story Club will have its very own personal IEP team to help it's members with any of their problems. 😂
So interesting, Mary! It's funny, I don't think I said the words out loud as I was stringing them together, but now that I am I can feel how nicely "fulsome" moves into "bright." I don't really *like* the word nascent, which is probably why I tucked it in the middle? (Except I just replaced it in my mind with an -ent word I like much more, "lambent," and nope. It still falls in the middle for me, out of preference for the other two word pairings).
Also going to throw in here that although English has been my primary language since childhood, it's technically not my first--I spoke mostly Japanese in my early years. Mentioning this because I once met a linguist who could immediately tell that fact based on the way I formed words in my mouth, which I found FASCINATING (and a little self-conscious making :) ).
Hey, Manami. You may not have said the words out loud, but you probably "heard" them inside your head when you were stringing them together. Also--I'm constantly noticing the way people talk/move their mouths, so I can totally relate to that linguist who knew right away that your first language wasn't English!
Same order for me. Fresh and fulsome (alliteration), ghostly and bright (harder; visual?) were automatically pairs. Nascent in the middle. Single syllables as bookends.
Until you mentioned it, I never thought of ghostly, bright together, but now I am picturing a shimmering, glowing presence, hovering in the air. I once thought I saw a ghostly form hovering at the foot of my bed in the dark but it turned out to be a white towel hanging off the back of a chair. I was disappointed but also relieved because it was scaring the bejesus out of me.
I'm straying from the 5-word exercise here, but thank you, Alfred and Niall, for calling out Sonnet 43 which I just read. I believe, as the sonnet says, that a loved one can glow brighter in the night when my eyes are closed and I am dreaming of that person, therefore making night like a bright day - "And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me."
This was my order too. I also shared the sense that "ghostly bright" belonged together. It has a nice rhythm (someone else below remarked on the rhythm of the whole phrase being bookended with single syllables). The vowels have a nice motion too, and the t's echo each other. The imagery as well: something bright but translucent. This really was a fascinating exercise.
That was my order too. But I guess it can change from day to day, right? I just liked the sound of them strung together like that and the order of the meanings.
Thank you George! I love an exercise where everybody's right. Love playing around with words. Of course, the reason this is so fun is because the words don't belong within a paragraph--and aren't even a sentence. (I see that some people here are relying solely on rhythm and feel while others are choosing to think about word meaning/order.) Once you change even one word in a sentence within a paragraph....well, the whole house of cards can come down. Suddenly, the sentences that came before and the sentences that come after need tweaking in order to re-establish the rhythm. I know some people don't like that part of revising, but I find it super fun.
Great exercise. I love rhythm and sound (maybe explains why I am a drummer) and my sentences need to flow and halt in a specific way I don’t necessarily plan this out, rather, it comes to me automatically. I know immediately when I don’t like the way a sentence unfolds. I’m partial to simple declarative sentences. I don’t always catch problems on first or second revisions, however. Also, a sentence’s construction can be determined by those directly preceding it. (A lot of “I’s” here. Sorry.- look forward to others’ process.)
It is killing me that none of the hundred comments I've read so far start with "bright-fresh." Those words are paired in my mind and work so well at the start of a phrase
Fresh, fulsome, nascent, ghostly, bright. I guess I liked easing in with a one-syllable, and with alliteration, and ending too with the little bang of another one-syllable. I was going with my ear mostly, and then thinking about the meaning of the words, how it might be nice to end on the surprising “ghostly,” but my ear wouldn’t let me.
I ended up with the same order, and for the same reasons! I like the one-syllable words as bookends, even though it was tempting to end with the more surprising "ghostly." But when you think about it, there is an interesting juxtaposition between "ghostly" and "bright."
Patti, I did end with ghostly... fresh bright nascent fulsome ghostly... no reason... no thinking much about it ... it just sounded like my morning when I did this... so for me, sound, not logic.
Clearly correct. I started with meanings that flowed together—nascent is a beginning, unformed, and ghostly is also unformed though perhaps an ending. Bright and fresh/fulsome might go together but too on the nose. Bright paired with ghostly pulls out a different feel. Like an ethereal brightness not the spring sun brightness of fresh. But maybe having fresh at the beginning and bright at the end lets them call to each other with a more subtle evocation.
I had to go back and re-read it now, too. I would argue that maybe it isn’t George that likes nascent so much, but Cummings. And we all know what a smug, pompous shit he is. :)
Or is it, could it be, re-naissance that is, or possibly was, going to be the point of Morse's headlong dive? Unfortunately we'll never know . . . unless there's 'The Falls Part 2' in George's pipeline.
some kind of pre-linguistic howl. In my opinion style is not separate from "meaning"; rather, it shows how the words are always pointing to something beyond/beneath/inside them.
“…whenever I am engaged on a translation project, I experience continually, offside my vision, a sensation of veils flying up. As brightness blows the rising wide cold rush the skull. I’ve come to call the sensation Cassandra because I first noticed it one day in school when I was reading a passage of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – the passage where Cassandra cries out ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ This cry is famous - it leads into 300 lines of vision and prophecy in which Cassandra tells the past and future of the house of Atreus, including the fact of her own death. At the midpoint of this telling she utters these lines: ‘Behold no longer my oracle out from veils shall be glancing like a newly married bride but as brightness blows the rising sun open it will rush my oceans forward onto light – a grief more deep than me’. What is it like to be a prophet? Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there. Everywhere Cassandra ran the glue was coming up off the edge of the page and, when she pulled at it, this page was underneath, this page on which I am telling you that everywhere Cassandra ran she found she could float…
…But let’s return to her opening line: ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ This utterance is a scream. It is untranslatable, yet not meaningless. A scream conveys specific emotion and can make things happen. In this case the scream is also metrically exact, fitted into the scansion of the verses around it. Often in English translation, such utterances are rendered by the word ‘Alas.’ Should ‘Alas’ seem inadequate, the translator may choose to transliterate the Greek letters of the scream into English sounds…on the grounds that this is more pure and true. Is it more pure and true? Perhaps a prior question is in order: What is Cassandra doing speaking Greek? She is, after all, a Trojan princess who has never been away from home before. Now, generally, we refrain from asking this kind of question about the logic of a play. We don’t really want to listen to Cassandra speaking Trojan for the next half hour, and there is a dramaturgic convention called ‘the willed suspension of disbelief’ that makes it ok. But in this play, Aeschylus has already punctured the convention, for he begins the Cassandra scene with Cassandra standing silent on stage for 270 lines. Then Clytemnestra shouts at her, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you speak Greek?’ Aeschylus would like us to see the veils flying up in Cassandra’s mind; would like us to be wondering at what level of herself she is translating some pure gash of Trojan emotion into a metrically perfect line of Greek tragic verse, and what that translation has to do with the arts of prophecy, because in both cases there is some action of cutting through surfaces to a site that has no business being underneath. What is the future doing underneath the past? Or Greek metrics inside a Trojan silence? And how does it alter you to see it there, floating, and how can it float?
...I am interested in people who cut through things…Cracks, cuts, breaks, gashes, splittings, slicings, rips, tears, conical intersects, disruptions, etymologies…
…Let’s pause to consider the etymology of the word ‘etymology’. It comes from Greek ‘ἔτῠμος’, an adjective meaning ‘real, true, actual’, and ‘λόγος’, the basic noun for ‘word, story, account, analysis’. But the adjective ‘ἔτῠμος’ in turn has an etymology, probably derived from the verb ‘εἰμῐ́’: ‘to be, to exist’. So an etymology can be thought to give the true meaning of a word because it has is-ness in it. The etymologist makes cuts that show being as it floats inside things and how it floats and how can it.”
Zoe this is intriguing. So, 'OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ is not Greek words, but sounds of anguish fitted metrically into the lines of drama? Like, Aaaaaargh or aieeeeeeee--but these are alliterations. Is OTOTOTOI POPOI DA! meant to be alliterative, the same noises as a scream, or to evoke feelings emitted in despair?
I guess that's an example of how nothing is really separate, whether convergently or divergently. The territory of exclamations is at the limits of language, and the artist is naturally concerned with limits.
Makes me think of Jeffrey Eugenides and his Greek American families, tho don't remember him using these "screams with Greek trappings." Makes me want to write something using this new knowledge . . .
Thank you so much for the link. The Cassandra / Aeschylus part was wonderful…and then came Anne’s fifteen performance sonnets. Holy mother of language!!
Yes - it's a joy for us all to be able to share the words however deeply buried they might feel. I have been trying to read the whole of Red Cavalry, and your sense of 'a prolonged hallucinatory dream sequence' helps me on the journey.
The big word coming to mind is "body". Our bodies are a kind of language, just as language is a kind of body, each in ecstatic communion with itself. We speak from our bodies and hear in our bodies, the point of connection with the body of the world...I'd say that's oracular. Always more than us, but also nothing other than us.
As for Sappho's fragments, those lacunae themselves become the poem. The cuts that reveal the whole (not the cuts). Like a building falling into ruins, somehow what survives is more building than building.
Incarnations...yep, I think you've got it... "The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer....We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself." (James Joyce, Ulysses)
All in all.
Interesting you mention dialectics, because this sense of things being only what they are while also pointing to something beyond themselves is kind of the next step, the improvement on dialectics. Where it's the process by which something is reached (the beautiful blue line, if you will) which reveals reality, a sort of capacity for reality-making, as opposed to some limiting particular reality.
And I couldn't help but end with some actual Sappho fragments translated by Anne Carson.
It doesn’t get much better than Sappho, Anne Carson, Joyce, and Babel. Somehow what survives is more building than building, more body than body, more intelligent than intelligence, more lovely than love.
This is some thread! I lost a post in response (Cassandra seized it as she ran by), but it was something about the way the Joyce and Sappho passages and your words would inspired anyone to become monastic for a few days, contemplating. But I left out Aeschylus, which was why Cassandra intervened. Anyway it’s quite something how five seemingly unrelated mental lemon words that George imagined a couple days back have become rather consciousness-expanding for so many of us. Thanks to all of you.
I think even without the mention, Aeschylus was there, in the in between. As was George. Since everything is only seemingly unrelated. Thanks to all of you too!
Thank you, Zoe and Alfred-P. I love the deep thinking and feeling. Inspired to get back to writing. I’m looking forward to fixing up our new abode, moving in, setting up my writing space and diving in. And I feel so lucky to be interacting with the two of you, and with everyone here. Putting down roots and listening to the frog chorale while the child runs singing and the snow beneath the conifers reflects the moon and stars.
I just went to reply to the comment from 5 days ago and saw that you deleted it. Don't worry, you weren't being tiresome! It only took me a while to respond because life got in the way, as it does. I think you're asking good questions. This is stuff I'm still puzzling through as well...
The concept of autopoiesis would be good to look into. I'd also recommend this article: https://cepa.info/2055 (sorry it's not easier to read). Also process philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/), aka the "Philosophy of Organism". But I'd also say that I think all great art, philosophy, etc. is kind of an expression of this to some degree. There are really only a few truths, just being expressed differently.
I'm now going to throw together some quotes, possibly too many.
These quotes will be under the heading of "The crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead" :
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.” (Carl Jung)
"Nature is parts without a whole." (Alberto Caeiro aka Fernando Pessoa)
“For the rigors of the law are only an apparent expression of the protest of the One, whereas their real object is the absolution of fragmented universes, in which the law never unites anything in a single Whole, but on the contrary measures and maps out the divergences, the dispersions, the exploding into fragments of something that is innocent precisely because its source is madness.” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)
“…the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend." (James Joyce)
"Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it,
Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all,
and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are,
Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life,
For now it is convey’d to me that you are the purports essential,
That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons,
and that they are mainly for you,
That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality,
That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long,
That you will one day perhaps take control of all,
That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance,
That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not last so very long,
But you will last very long." (Walt Whitman)
These quotes will be under the heading of "There's a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in" :
"All effects of art are merely effects of nature for the person who has not attained a perception of art that is free, that is, one that is both passive and active, both swept away and reflective. Such a person behaves merely as a creature of nature and has never really experienced and appreciated art as art. What moves him are perhaps individual moments of beauty, while in the true work of art there is no individualized beauty; only the whole is beautiful. The person who has not yet elevated himself to the idea of the whole is totally incapable of evaluating a work of art. Yet in spite of this indifference, the majority of those who consider themselves cultured are most prone to display their judgment in matters of art and to play the connoisseur; rarely is a negative judgment more painful for them than the accusation that they have no taste at all." (Schelling)
"The traveler doesn’t return to the valley from the mountainside
with a handful of sod, around which all stand mute,
but with a word he’s won, a pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian." (Rilke)
"Error is the price we pay for progress." (Alfred North Whitehead)
"the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating / Joy of life" (Joanna Newsom)
And this quote will be the bridge:
“It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.” (Alfred North Whitehead)
nascent, ghostly, fresh, fulsome, bright: A progression; emergence ↠ so present it shines forth.
Things I noticed:
• I was deliberately suppressing my first impulse, which was to make the best of (or settle for and live with) the order in which I first read them.
• A couple of my choices were partly informed by associations I have from some specialties I studied. Every specialty has its jargon, and I often enjoy learning the lexicon at least as much as the practice of the thing.
Things I noticed after reading others':
• I assumed a visual or conceptual meaning when I could have as easily assumed a material and physical one. Interesting.
• I'm enamored of many other results and reasons as soon as I read them.
fulsome, fresh, nascent, ghostly, bright. Realized just now this nearly trochaic pentameter. Perhaps meter subconsciously plays a part, at least for me anyway.
Bright, Nascent, Fulsome, Ghostly, Fresh. Bright was an obvious first choice for me - the word itself is bright: hard consonants, big, wide-open mouthed long vowel, hard ending. Love it. Then Nascent, because it is the most interesting word. I think I chose Fresh at the end, because it mirrored the sharp, single syllable start (although the 'f' start and 'sh' ending are softer...), and I think I threw Ghostly in between Fulsome and Fresh, because both words seem dull to me, and having them together would have magnified that, so Ghostly kind of deflects from their beigeness...
Whew! I thought I was the only one who went bright first. I went bright, fresh, nascent, ghostly, fulsome. Bright felt right to start or end on and fresh just seemed to follow best. Then what to do with nascent and ghostly. I knew I didn't want to end on them. Fulsome has a nice closed consonant that feels good at the end. In the end the meter filled in the last two.
nascent, fresh, bright, fulsome, ghostly...the evolution of a flower?
This was my order as well. I was thinking about stars, so I loved that you came to the same conclusion when thinking about flowers. I guess our theme is "humble beginnings, intensive life, and then death." God, we are so insightful!
I used the same order- I was thinking birth to death.
I did not even think of flowers or birth or death. I just put them in the order or how much I liked each word. ha. silly
Ghostly bright nascent, fresh fulsome, no thinking involved. But immediately I was thinking, and resisting: how could I do this with just adjectives, how could there be meaning in it. I see that many of you did find meaning in this string. I can learn from this. I think that when I am reworking sentences in my writing I am like a copy editor--"which one is most correct or rhythmically sounds best"--but the question here is different. Maybe I can remember this in writing stories.
My insight is that in my own voice, I use a lot of adjectives--maybe overuse them. So I did not turn any of the words into verbs (freshen, brighten, etc.), or adverbs (brightly, fulsomely). So it was easy to craft several sentences using the words as adjectives. Then George has me thinking about economy and I know I can look for and find adjectives and descriptions to eliminate and improve the flow of my sentences. Fulsome is tricky because it can have very different connotations.
Bonnie: Perfectly acceptable way to go about it!
Not silly Bonnie. “I like this, I don’t like that.” Fundamental. Personal preference, expressed, freely . . . So fundamental.
So fascinating to read all the variations and the different reasonings!
Yes, I totally love this order you've found. (Writers: making order from disorder in order to make meaning of the world.) It's the evolution of anything, really. A flower, yes. Also, love. Friendship. A casserole. A sunset. Love it.
my order as well, it's spring! then you have to mow the lawn
That's the exact order I put them in!
Interesting. I didn't think "flower," so much as "idea." Mine started with a hint, a ghost, then matured.
Thank you for focusing on the important creative work of translators. We are too often overlooked.
I just read a book review of a recent Eng translation of a novel, and the name of the publishing co was mentioned but the name of the translator was not. 🙄
And then I read this post and felt better. Looking forward to the next post too.
Cheers from Athens
Seems from your post Gigi that there two distinct categories of overlooked translators: those who are above the line, so to speak, and credited and, then, those who are below the line and uncredited.
In having 'My First Goose' on the anvil to work on in our wordsmiths' forges we seem to have an original text by a Russian writer the translation of which has been a significant contribution to the building the careers of a number of notable 'above the line, credited' translators.
Spring weather warming nicely in Athens just now?
Hello from sunny Athens (it's finally feeling like spring today after a cold snap last week).
Unfortunately, many times even credited translators don't get the mentions they deserve. All translators should be credited.
There has been a recent movement to put translators' names on the front cover of the book they've translated:
https://lithub.com/the-movement-to-put-translators-names-on-book-covers-is-working/
As a linguist, I've lots of experience in how slippery translations are. Perennial problem. Take a language not related to English, one with complex words (maybe a nice North American indigenous language with lots of stuff on the verb) and get a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss -without the translation into English- and try to figure out what it means.
I was also thinking about word order here and how some languages, like French, have a fairly rigid syntax while others are far looser, like Russian, which is what Babel wrote in. The non-rigid languages have the potential to achieve a greater flow and lyricism -- or clunking awkwardness, or breathless, sprinting cadences -- since you have so much more freedom to arrange your words according to sound. But capturing this in translation can be a huge headache. In my own work (I do some Estonian translation) half the battle is putting the bits of proper English syntax into some sort of flow that mimics the original.
And what chance that what you've figured will turn out to be what a peer translator will have figured? I'm no linguist, alas, but I am enjoying what seem - in the case of translations of Isaac Bebel's 'My First Goose' what seem to be rather, and richly, enigmatic variations on interpretation of words, phrases and so sentences and possibly, even, paragraphs.
Yes! Translations are closer to interpretations than equivalencies. Context matters, all you mention. I work with people whose languages and cultures are different from Euro-western ones. The, maybe natural, tendency is to work with English as a kind of metalanguage and meta culture. We can't avoid working from where we are, what we know. But it requires me paying attention to the original context and content. And structure. Sometimes structure impedes translation.
Like in the many comments somewhere in these streams, more credit is due credit to the talent of translators.
Went to a conference once on translation. One speaker - not a literary translator, but all are equally neglected - told of how she'd been asked to 'copy this text into English, please'.
It's an odd state of affairs, not just that translators' work and contribution to widening access to literature has not been acknowledged as a matter of course (which is hard to understand), but that Pan MacMillan have taken firm steps to redress such an oversight (which is hareder still to understand).
When I see someone writing it in the order that I didn't put it in, I think: no. It's so funny! ; )
Despite what George said, there is a right answer and I nailed it.
Haha you're too funny
Haha!
I thought, 'Oh, no! Their order is so much better!' I didn't work with sounds, but more with meaning: fresh, bright, nascent, ghostly, fulsome. I keep thinking the fulsome sticks out like a swollen thumb and I couldn't work into another order--fresh and bright, nascent and ghostly, dump the fulsome...
So glad someone else wanted to dump the fulsome!!
That dastardly fulsome!!
Ditto. I kept thinking that fulsome is a word I would never use and want to drop.
I always have to look it up, so same for me. It's like "bemused." It sounds like it should mean something different. But someone could deploy it well. That is just not me.
Hah, I kinda like "fulsome." I associate it with an older era. So when a contemporary author uses it, it draws attention to itself in an ironic way. For example,
“I suspect that most authors don’t really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.” - Neil Gaiman
That's fine, and fulsome fits beautifully into that list of adjectives, which all attach usefully to 'praise', even reaching a climax. Lovely quote! This, for me, is exactly why it doesn't fit the list George gave us, all the rest of which seem to suggest physical, not abstract qualities. I've heard it mis-used so often by news casters, when what they mean is 'full/fully', that I just don't choose to use it any more - except following Gaiman, of course!
Doh! All this time I've been thinking that "fulsome" meant to the nth degree, as in the most fully fullest manifestation of a thing, like a flower in full bloom. But now that I've looked it up in the dictionary, I realize it means excessive and overblown, so I guess I'm just like those uninformed news casters. I am truly embarrassedsome.
Don't be, Lisa - the mistake is so common that it's shortly about to become 'usage', I suspect, to the chagrin of many of those who hate it when some useful word is misused, appropriated, and then lost. I had to look it up myself, to make sure my semantic structure wasn't wrong - and this time it wasn't!
I’m sure the only place I ever read “fulsome” is misused in the newspaper
so often....
To be fair I never remember what it means either
So true! I don't even want to say what order my husband put them in 🙄
They’re definitely wrong.
Haha!
Totally!
Sforza - what a fantastic, historic name....
Thanks, Kate! Generally it perplexes people, so it's nice when people recognize it. : )
Well - it IS one of the harder Italian names to pronounce… but it’s SO grand…
😘
Just think: you could have been stuck with the last name Borgia!
Fresh, fulsome, nascent, ghostly, bright. I knew right away that I wanted "ghostly, bright" together, at the end. But why?
So (among other things), i'm a speech therapist, which means I also studied sounds and linguistics, etc. One thing that happens when you string words together is that they feel more natural sometimes due to the placement of your tongue/teeth and the amount of air sliding between your lips, etc. Think also in terms of long vowels and short vowels, repetitions, word length, etc. So. "Fresh, fulsome" works better than "fulsome, fresh," because the following word you've chosen (nascent) is closer in tongue movement to the ending sound of fulsome. Your lips close to make the "m" sound and then you move to the "n" of nascent, also made in the front of the mouth. "Bright" would be better here as it begins with the lips together, just as fulsome ends with the lips together so there is a flow there. But the fact of the single syllable along with the long vowel in "bright" may not play as well to your ear. "Ghostly, Bright" both have the harder, long vowels in them, and ending with "bright" provides a nice "boom." So I do like the order you have given the words here! In my mind, they are offset like a poem:
fresh, fulsome
nascent,
ghostly, bright
So I am a school psychologist and I love my speech pathologist, y'all are so smart!
I was a school speech pathologist and loved my school psychologist! Let's hear it for people who work in the schools!
That's it; let's start a business together called 'George Saunders' Fresh Fulsome Speech and Psychological Services.'
Too long?
Fresh, Fulsome and Bright!
Hey, I'm a (retired but still working) speech pathologist too. And I loved my school psychs. I agree about people working in the schools. And I totally agree with what you said about the sounds.
Now that we got 2 speech paths and a psych, we just need an Occupational Therapist and a Special Education Teacher. Then Story Club will have its very own personal IEP team to help it's members with any of their problems. 😂
I'm glad you wrote--I no longer work as a speech path, so it's good to know I got it right!
So interesting, Mary! It's funny, I don't think I said the words out loud as I was stringing them together, but now that I am I can feel how nicely "fulsome" moves into "bright." I don't really *like* the word nascent, which is probably why I tucked it in the middle? (Except I just replaced it in my mind with an -ent word I like much more, "lambent," and nope. It still falls in the middle for me, out of preference for the other two word pairings).
Also going to throw in here that although English has been my primary language since childhood, it's technically not my first--I spoke mostly Japanese in my early years. Mentioning this because I once met a linguist who could immediately tell that fact based on the way I formed words in my mouth, which I found FASCINATING (and a little self-conscious making :) ).
Hey, Manami. You may not have said the words out loud, but you probably "heard" them inside your head when you were stringing them together. Also--I'm constantly noticing the way people talk/move their mouths, so I can totally relate to that linguist who knew right away that your first language wasn't English!
So interesting!
Cool! Nice insight.
I think ALL good writing has an element of that
do you/did you study with Jack Grapes??
I took one course from Jack a few years ago. He's adored by many, but he wasn't for me.
Mine was *almost* the same:
nascent ghostly bright, fulsome fresh.
I also knew I wanted ‘ghostly bright’ as well as ‘fulsome fresh’
'ghostly bright' leaped right out at me too.
I had always been drawn to a line in Sonnet 43:
...
and darkly bright, are bright in dark directed
....
I wonder if that played a part in my preference
Which left me a choice... seems rhythm plays a big part in my own decisions....
ghostly bright; nascent fulsome fresh
ghostly bright; fulsome fresh nascent
I like both...
Same order for me. Fresh and fulsome (alliteration), ghostly and bright (harder; visual?) were automatically pairs. Nascent in the middle. Single syllables as bookends.
Until you mentioned it, I never thought of ghostly, bright together, but now I am picturing a shimmering, glowing presence, hovering in the air. I once thought I saw a ghostly form hovering at the foot of my bed in the dark but it turned out to be a white towel hanging off the back of a chair. I was disappointed but also relieved because it was scaring the bejesus out of me.
I'm straying from the 5-word exercise here, but thank you, Alfred and Niall, for calling out Sonnet 43 which I just read. I believe, as the sonnet says, that a loved one can glow brighter in the night when my eyes are closed and I am dreaming of that person, therefore making night like a bright day - "And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me."
This was my order too. I also shared the sense that "ghostly bright" belonged together. It has a nice rhythm (someone else below remarked on the rhythm of the whole phrase being bookended with single syllables). The vowels have a nice motion too, and the t's echo each other. The imagery as well: something bright but translucent. This really was a fascinating exercise.
I did this too! I think I liked the rhythm of it. How the single syllable words started and ended the pattern.
That was my order too. But I guess it can change from day to day, right? I just liked the sound of them strung together like that and the order of the meanings.
(I guess because I'm saying it to myself in this way: "Fresh and fulsome. Nascent, ghostly bright.")
Thank you George! I love an exercise where everybody's right. Love playing around with words. Of course, the reason this is so fun is because the words don't belong within a paragraph--and aren't even a sentence. (I see that some people here are relying solely on rhythm and feel while others are choosing to think about word meaning/order.) Once you change even one word in a sentence within a paragraph....well, the whole house of cards can come down. Suddenly, the sentences that came before and the sentences that come after need tweaking in order to re-establish the rhythm. I know some people don't like that part of revising, but I find it super fun.
Yes, that's where I went wrong - I almost had to use the words in a paragraph, a very particular one
Great exercise. I love rhythm and sound (maybe explains why I am a drummer) and my sentences need to flow and halt in a specific way I don’t necessarily plan this out, rather, it comes to me automatically. I know immediately when I don’t like the way a sentence unfolds. I’m partial to simple declarative sentences. I don’t always catch problems on first or second revisions, however. Also, a sentence’s construction can be determined by those directly preceding it. (A lot of “I’s” here. Sorry.- look forward to others’ process.)
I take photos of sunrises over Lake Michigan so:
Ghostly, Nascent, Fresh, Fulsome, Bright
I like ending with the boldness of “Bright;” the other words have a softness to them...
I also came up with this order. Maybe it’s because I’m also from Michigan?
Yes, the very same order and thought process I used, although I'm not a photog...the sense of a dawning progressing toward illumination captured me.
It is killing me that none of the hundred comments I've read so far start with "bright-fresh." Those words are paired in my mind and work so well at the start of a phrase
Mine did. See most recent comment and my rationale for it.
Nice, I think both of us went purely for sound as opposed to a lot of the other answers here
It's probably how i revise, too.
Fresh, fulsome, nascent, ghostly, bright. I guess I liked easing in with a one-syllable, and with alliteration, and ending too with the little bang of another one-syllable. I was going with my ear mostly, and then thinking about the meaning of the words, how it might be nice to end on the surprising “ghostly,” but my ear wouldn’t let me.
Yes, this is the correct order.
you are cracking me up
I ended up with the same order, and for the same reasons! I like the one-syllable words as bookends, even though it was tempting to end with the more surprising "ghostly." But when you think about it, there is an interesting juxtaposition between "ghostly" and "bright."
Patti, I did end with ghostly... fresh bright nascent fulsome ghostly... no reason... no thinking much about it ... it just sounded like my morning when I did this... so for me, sound, not logic.
Same order here!
Clearly correct. I started with meanings that flowed together—nascent is a beginning, unformed, and ghostly is also unformed though perhaps an ending. Bright and fresh/fulsome might go together but too on the nose. Bright paired with ghostly pulls out a different feel. Like an ethereal brightness not the spring sun brightness of fresh. But maybe having fresh at the beginning and bright at the end lets them call to each other with a more subtle evocation.
I’m flabbergasted by all the hate for fulsome in these comments, when it’s CLEAR that nascent is the real problem.
Calling all fulsome haters: please explain.
I just re-read The Falls. George REALLY likes the word nascent.
I had to go back and re-read it now, too. I would argue that maybe it isn’t George that likes nascent so much, but Cummings. And we all know what a smug, pompous shit he is. :)
Ha!
Or is it, could it be, re-naissance that is, or possibly was, going to be the point of Morse's headlong dive? Unfortunately we'll never know . . . unless there's 'The Falls Part 2' in George's pipeline.
Ha ha ha! You are SO right! I LOVE fulsome….
Agreed!
ghostly bright fulsome nascent fresh
some kind of pre-linguistic howl. In my opinion style is not separate from "meaning"; rather, it shows how the words are always pointing to something beyond/beneath/inside them.
“…whenever I am engaged on a translation project, I experience continually, offside my vision, a sensation of veils flying up. As brightness blows the rising wide cold rush the skull. I’ve come to call the sensation Cassandra because I first noticed it one day in school when I was reading a passage of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – the passage where Cassandra cries out ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ This cry is famous - it leads into 300 lines of vision and prophecy in which Cassandra tells the past and future of the house of Atreus, including the fact of her own death. At the midpoint of this telling she utters these lines: ‘Behold no longer my oracle out from veils shall be glancing like a newly married bride but as brightness blows the rising sun open it will rush my oceans forward onto light – a grief more deep than me’. What is it like to be a prophet? Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there. Everywhere Cassandra ran the glue was coming up off the edge of the page and, when she pulled at it, this page was underneath, this page on which I am telling you that everywhere Cassandra ran she found she could float…
…But let’s return to her opening line: ‘OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ This utterance is a scream. It is untranslatable, yet not meaningless. A scream conveys specific emotion and can make things happen. In this case the scream is also metrically exact, fitted into the scansion of the verses around it. Often in English translation, such utterances are rendered by the word ‘Alas.’ Should ‘Alas’ seem inadequate, the translator may choose to transliterate the Greek letters of the scream into English sounds…on the grounds that this is more pure and true. Is it more pure and true? Perhaps a prior question is in order: What is Cassandra doing speaking Greek? She is, after all, a Trojan princess who has never been away from home before. Now, generally, we refrain from asking this kind of question about the logic of a play. We don’t really want to listen to Cassandra speaking Trojan for the next half hour, and there is a dramaturgic convention called ‘the willed suspension of disbelief’ that makes it ok. But in this play, Aeschylus has already punctured the convention, for he begins the Cassandra scene with Cassandra standing silent on stage for 270 lines. Then Clytemnestra shouts at her, ‘What’s the matter, don’t you speak Greek?’ Aeschylus would like us to see the veils flying up in Cassandra’s mind; would like us to be wondering at what level of herself she is translating some pure gash of Trojan emotion into a metrically perfect line of Greek tragic verse, and what that translation has to do with the arts of prophecy, because in both cases there is some action of cutting through surfaces to a site that has no business being underneath. What is the future doing underneath the past? Or Greek metrics inside a Trojan silence? And how does it alter you to see it there, floating, and how can it float?
...I am interested in people who cut through things…Cracks, cuts, breaks, gashes, splittings, slicings, rips, tears, conical intersects, disruptions, etymologies…
…Let’s pause to consider the etymology of the word ‘etymology’. It comes from Greek ‘ἔτῠμος’, an adjective meaning ‘real, true, actual’, and ‘λόγος’, the basic noun for ‘word, story, account, analysis’. But the adjective ‘ἔτῠμος’ in turn has an etymology, probably derived from the verb ‘εἰμῐ́’: ‘to be, to exist’. So an etymology can be thought to give the true meaning of a word because it has is-ness in it. The etymologist makes cuts that show being as it floats inside things and how it floats and how can it.”
(from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZOd2nDVk84)
Zoe this is intriguing. So, 'OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!’ is not Greek words, but sounds of anguish fitted metrically into the lines of drama? Like, Aaaaaargh or aieeeeeeee--but these are alliterations. Is OTOTOTOI POPOI DA! meant to be alliterative, the same noises as a scream, or to evoke feelings emitted in despair?
So, you actually inspired me to look it up. Apparently "exclamations" are just a thing in Greek. They're established words, but they don't mean anything other than an expression of some kind of feeling. (some examples: https://blogs.transparent.com/greek/show-your-emotions-with-greek-interjections/)
We definitely have similar things in English (like, say, "ow"), but Greek seems to make particularly rich use of them.
I also found this: https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/148/abstract/translating-exclamations-aeschylus
Well, exclamations are a thing in many musically accompanied word-based art forms. Just think of the blues….
I guess that's an example of how nothing is really separate, whether convergently or divergently. The territory of exclamations is at the limits of language, and the artist is naturally concerned with limits.
With going past them, I believe. Or at least bending them.
Or eating them.
Yes, that's how I interpreted it. Sort of a scream with Greek trappings on it. A scream that's recognizably Greek, but doesn't use actual words.
Youpee to express joy, like yippee, must be related?
An etymological mystery...
Makes me think of Jeffrey Eugenides and his Greek American families, tho don't remember him using these "screams with Greek trappings." Makes me want to write something using this new knowledge . . .
Go forth and howl!
Thank you
Thank you so much for the link. The Cassandra / Aeschylus part was wonderful…and then came Anne’s fifteen performance sonnets. Holy mother of language!!
Glad you appreciated it :)
Love this. My gratitude.
Oh my goodness! How thrilling. Thank you
Yes - it's a joy for us all to be able to share the words however deeply buried they might feel. I have been trying to read the whole of Red Cavalry, and your sense of 'a prolonged hallucinatory dream sequence' helps me on the journey.
Thank you for this awe-summoning post, Zoe! I hope to read it several more times. Archaeology of language and meaning.
The big word coming to mind is "body". Our bodies are a kind of language, just as language is a kind of body, each in ecstatic communion with itself. We speak from our bodies and hear in our bodies, the point of connection with the body of the world...I'd say that's oracular. Always more than us, but also nothing other than us.
As for Sappho's fragments, those lacunae themselves become the poem. The cuts that reveal the whole (not the cuts). Like a building falling into ruins, somehow what survives is more building than building.
Incarnations...yep, I think you've got it... "The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer....We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself." (James Joyce, Ulysses)
All in all.
Interesting you mention dialectics, because this sense of things being only what they are while also pointing to something beyond themselves is kind of the next step, the improvement on dialectics. Where it's the process by which something is reached (the beautiful blue line, if you will) which reveals reality, a sort of capacity for reality-making, as opposed to some limiting particular reality.
And I couldn't help but end with some actual Sappho fragments translated by Anne Carson.
\\
and on a soft bed
delicate
you would let loose your longing
and neither any[ ]nor any
holy place nor
was there from which you were absent
no grove[ ]no dance
]no sound
[
\\
\\
Someone will remember us
I say
Even in another time
\\
It doesn’t get much better than Sappho, Anne Carson, Joyce, and Babel. Somehow what survives is more building than building, more body than body, more intelligent than intelligence, more lovely than love.
This is some thread! I lost a post in response (Cassandra seized it as she ran by), but it was something about the way the Joyce and Sappho passages and your words would inspired anyone to become monastic for a few days, contemplating. But I left out Aeschylus, which was why Cassandra intervened. Anyway it’s quite something how five seemingly unrelated mental lemon words that George imagined a couple days back have become rather consciousness-expanding for so many of us. Thanks to all of you.
I think even without the mention, Aeschylus was there, in the in between. As was George. Since everything is only seemingly unrelated. Thanks to all of you too!
“Only seemingly unrelated.” So true!
Thank you, Zoe and Alfred-P. I love the deep thinking and feeling. Inspired to get back to writing. I’m looking forward to fixing up our new abode, moving in, setting up my writing space and diving in. And I feel so lucky to be interacting with the two of you, and with everyone here. Putting down roots and listening to the frog chorale while the child runs singing and the snow beneath the conifers reflects the moon and stars.
Thank you for this expression of the thing bigger than us that I am just glad to be a part of.
You are all lifting me and spinning my boat as I paddle furiously down your rapids, sloppy grin in tow. Oracular, indeed.
I just went to reply to the comment from 5 days ago and saw that you deleted it. Don't worry, you weren't being tiresome! It only took me a while to respond because life got in the way, as it does. I think you're asking good questions. This is stuff I'm still puzzling through as well...
The concept of autopoiesis would be good to look into. I'd also recommend this article: https://cepa.info/2055 (sorry it's not easier to read). Also process philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/), aka the "Philosophy of Organism". But I'd also say that I think all great art, philosophy, etc. is kind of an expression of this to some degree. There are really only a few truths, just being expressed differently.
I'm now going to throw together some quotes, possibly too many.
These quotes will be under the heading of "The crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead" :
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.” (Carl Jung)
"Nature is parts without a whole." (Alberto Caeiro aka Fernando Pessoa)
“For the rigors of the law are only an apparent expression of the protest of the One, whereas their real object is the absolution of fragmented universes, in which the law never unites anything in a single Whole, but on the contrary measures and maps out the divergences, the dispersions, the exploding into fragments of something that is innocent precisely because its source is madness.” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)
“…the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend." (James Joyce)
"Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it,
Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all,
and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are,
Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life,
For now it is convey’d to me that you are the purports essential,
That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons,
and that they are mainly for you,
That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality,
That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long,
That you will one day perhaps take control of all,
That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance,
That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not last so very long,
But you will last very long." (Walt Whitman)
These quotes will be under the heading of "There's a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in" :
"All effects of art are merely effects of nature for the person who has not attained a perception of art that is free, that is, one that is both passive and active, both swept away and reflective. Such a person behaves merely as a creature of nature and has never really experienced and appreciated art as art. What moves him are perhaps individual moments of beauty, while in the true work of art there is no individualized beauty; only the whole is beautiful. The person who has not yet elevated himself to the idea of the whole is totally incapable of evaluating a work of art. Yet in spite of this indifference, the majority of those who consider themselves cultured are most prone to display their judgment in matters of art and to play the connoisseur; rarely is a negative judgment more painful for them than the accusation that they have no taste at all." (Schelling)
"The traveler doesn’t return to the valley from the mountainside
with a handful of sod, around which all stand mute,
but with a word he’s won, a pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian." (Rilke)
"Error is the price we pay for progress." (Alfred North Whitehead)
"the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating / Joy of life" (Joanna Newsom)
And this quote will be the bridge:
“It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.” (Alfred North Whitehead)
I got my t-shirt and hat, and what I want to know is: when and where is Story Club Camp this summer?
nascent, ghostly, fresh, fulsome, bright: A progression; emergence ↠ so present it shines forth.
Things I noticed:
• I was deliberately suppressing my first impulse, which was to make the best of (or settle for and live with) the order in which I first read them.
• A couple of my choices were partly informed by associations I have from some specialties I studied. Every specialty has its jargon, and I often enjoy learning the lexicon at least as much as the practice of the thing.
Things I noticed after reading others':
• I assumed a visual or conceptual meaning when I could have as easily assumed a material and physical one. Interesting.
• I'm enamored of many other results and reasons as soon as I read them.
Fun exercise!
Love the insights!
fulsome, fresh, nascent, ghostly, bright. Realized just now this nearly trochaic pentameter. Perhaps meter subconsciously plays a part, at least for me anyway.
Bright, Nascent, Fulsome, Ghostly, Fresh. Bright was an obvious first choice for me - the word itself is bright: hard consonants, big, wide-open mouthed long vowel, hard ending. Love it. Then Nascent, because it is the most interesting word. I think I chose Fresh at the end, because it mirrored the sharp, single syllable start (although the 'f' start and 'sh' ending are softer...), and I think I threw Ghostly in between Fulsome and Fresh, because both words seem dull to me, and having them together would have magnified that, so Ghostly kind of deflects from their beigeness...
Words. Gotta love 'em.
Whew! I thought I was the only one who went bright first. I went bright, fresh, nascent, ghostly, fulsome. Bright felt right to start or end on and fresh just seemed to follow best. Then what to do with nascent and ghostly. I knew I didn't want to end on them. Fulsome has a nice closed consonant that feels good at the end. In the end the meter filled in the last two.
ghostly bright,
fresh fulsome,
nascent
(I'm just thinking in sound and rhythm, rather than any logic - obviously. ;)
That’s almost what I got. I made a poem. :p