Prepositions, and: My Brain on Szymborska
2022; Feminist Studies; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/fem.2022.0063
ISSN2153-3873
Autores Tópico(s)Translation Studies and Practices
ResumoPrepositions, and: My Brain on Szymborska Shirley Geok-lin Lim (bio) Prepositions Am I the only English teacher whocannot decide which prepositionto use? To or For? To give or For me?Which speaks precisely, and to whomdoes it matter? I am a second-tonguepoet, teaching English as if it isnative to me. Or native for me?A language that gives to me and for me. Does anyone else have a problem withwith? Seated with him is not quite by him.He helps me to a seat; I am seated by him.I sit with him; I have seatedmyself by him. One is passive.Is my other active voice? Transgressivevoice. I learned from Puerto Ricans,Spanish is not perfect native inthe South Bronx. esl native is imperfectpre-position, to-ing and fro-ing.Native speakers too dislike prepositions.Press pause as they write. Preposterousto figure out such flim-flam grammar. In writing, we are imposters,guessing at meanings hot off the press,surmising hypotheses raised to heightsof interpretation, before degradinginto error. No language is owned [End Page 887] at birthright, towering Babel, muezzinscalling one hundred and fifty prepositions,crying about Being, fumblingand tumbling, within and without. [End Page 888] My Brain on Szymborska My brain, barren, deserted, locked down,is cramped with greeting cards, many with namesI no longer fix a face to. Names withno faces. The faces have died years ago.More likely, passed on to otherstates, countries, lives. I've forgotten themas I have been forgotten, blank cardsin a frontal cortex. Then Szymborskadrifts in, each poem a scarf, vivid, multihued. Joseph's coat of many colors—Father had favored him above brotherswho disdained him for his skinny frame,throwing him into a hole, crying Die, brat! Rescued, Pharoah's right-hand man,she wrote a poem for Lenin. Yet I find spacefor Szymborska's coat, here, in a closetwith a gap for her garment. The scarves floatin the dust, their colors burn brighter.They warm my old body. Heat! Not scarves butflames. No longer deserted, my brainis a tree on fire, alive, a firethat will never be ash. Flickeringin tongues, Szymborska cracklesin city squares rubbished by Pharoah's missiles. [End Page 889] Shirley Geok-lin Lim shirley geok-lin lim's poetry has been widely anthologized; published in The Hudson Review, Feminist Studies, Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals; featured by Bill Moyers and Tracy K. Smith's Slowdown; and set to music as libretto for various scores. She is the recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, two American Book Awards, melus and Feminist Press Lifetime Achievement Awards, and the University of California Santa Barbara's Research Lecturer Award. She has authored eleven poetry collections, three novels, The Shirley Lim Collection, three story collections, two critical studies, and is editor/coeditor of over eighteen anthologies and journal special issues. Copyright © 2022 Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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