The sea, like poetry, is essentially untranslatable. This does not mean that it cannot be represented. In photographs and poetry and prose, in paintings and drawings and, who knows, in sculpture, we set down the sea. We echo its rhythms and rhymes in music; we sing the whisper and crash of its waves. Our thoughts and feelings are mirrored in the shimmering water, floating like clouds in the drowned sky. Now paint this – the eternal movement hitched to the moon. Draw it – the dancing light above the deep. Write it down – poetry in the wet sand, stories on the breaking crests of waves. Take a photo, a pixeled portrait of colour and light. This is how we see the sea, but the sea itself it is not. Art, as representation, can only be the perfumed breath of an unspeakable poem. So, in the nature of the untranslatable, a poem in Afrikaans:
mens kan nie as die see só lyk soos ’n metaalskrootwerf in die eerste son waag om jou rug te draai nie want ’n engel kan val, stukkies souterige dons tussen die golwe, sonder dat jy dit sien. dus, pleeg jou poëem in die sand (foster-parent to a poem) tussen die slakke bloublasies seebamboese sodat jy die see nog dop kan hou: miskien plons ’n engel weer en kan jy later, stadige skriba, skryf met die ligpunt van sy veer. (Ilse van Staden, from Watervlerk, 2003)
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