Introduction
Abstract
"TRANS-" "TO THE OTHER SIDE OF, OVER, ACROSS" Crossings: every " word " translates the world we live into the world we know. When the proc ess of language works, our known world comes alive in word s, animate and experiential. Among other plastic forms of human expression (music, dance, costume, drama, sculpture, painting), words embody reality: -through metaphor to re concile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent ! -"A Sort of a Song," Williams, Selected Poems. When more than one language and culture and space/time lies at either end of this metamorphic and multiple process, the trans lator must look two ways at once: to carryover, as much as po ssible, the experiential integrity of the original, and to regenerate the spirit of the source in a new verbal performance. Two languages and artists orbit at the beginning and end, neither simultaneous nor identical, but reciprocal - and recipient to differing audiences. When the tribal ear listens ceremonially at one end of this continuum, and the existential eye scans the printed page at the other end, questions of form and function, how and why one uses language, the designs of literature, naturally come into play. "Firmly planted. Not fallen from on high: sprung up from below," Octavia Paz, the Mexican poet, says In Praise of Hands. The voiced Word, like the handmade object, the right-told tale, the well-shaped poem, speaks of "a mutually shared physical life," not as icon, commodity, or art for its own precious sake. "A glass jug, a wicker basket, a coarse muslin huipil, a wooden serving dish: beautiful objects, not despite their usefulness but because of it."