Is Translating Your Own Writing Really “Translation”?

When my editor and publisher asked me to write something about self-translation, I wondered if it would be counterproductive to admit that I am bilingual in poetry and that for me—when it comes to expressing myself in verse—the transition from English to Croatian and vice versa is like the difference between swimming in the sea, a river, or a lake; that in both languages there is a pleasure in going with and against the current, floating on your back with a view of the blue sky, fighting the waves with the taste of salt in your mouth, or being gently caressed by freshwater.

I must say right from the start that I am educated in the art of translation. I am aware of differences in idiomatic usage, I know how to express cultural nuances embedded in different languages, and how to compensate for these differences in order to build a healthy “relationship” with the original text that is not only an exercise in accuracy, but also an agreement to be faithful in love: not to be vain, not to be hypocritical—to be yourself and ready to please the other in your embrace. Love without betrayal but also without self-destructive submission.

Poetry in translation must not limp in order to show how serious the cognitive “effort” is: it is best for it to run like a child flying a kite. In bilingual poetry writing, there is no self-translation at all. It is the pure pleasure (and pure pain) of moving from one dimension of language to another that offers different possibilities, opening up at the same time the possibility of recognizing identity traps and creating a chance for their reconciliation in the deep structure of the language of poetry.

Sometimes I think the Guarani people of South America rightly speak of nhande reko: a poetic path leading away from the destructive world of appearances, toward the open space where the geometry of “true time opens its petals.”

The bilingualism in swimming through the medium of poetic expression in Soiled with Earth, Drunk on Air is of a specific type, as I wrote each poem simultaneously in Croatian and English—almost in the same breath—day after day until I finished the book. The poems were written in free verse (first in English, then in my native tongue, Croatian), but the meditative-shamanic rhythm of the couplets was carried through the entire manuscript, which required from me focused dedication and consistency in the chosen procedure. In this respect, working on this book was similar to gardening.

The dramaturgy of performing a meditative verse as the relationship between the poetic voice and the “meaningful silence” can be compared to whistling while passing through a dark forest. It can be a way to use sound to dispel the fear of the invisible. Or something else: establishing connections with the barely perceptible, searching for color beyond the visible spectrum, recognizing sound beyond the threshold of hearing. At the heart of each of the poems in the book is the icaro (the magical song of the plant) as a very personal relationship with nature. The time of writing was therefore inseparable from the time of waiting for the biophilic form of imagination to call me and teach me its hidden melody.

The principle embedded in the South American shamanic concept of icaro is the principle of receptivity as receiving from nature and singing from nature, rather than writing about nature and for nature. This is why my ecology of the spirit is not the poetry of ecological activism. Gary Snyder says that “the shaman gives songs to dreams, speaks for the green of the leaves, the soil, the wild animals and the spirits of the plants and mountains,” but with me it is the exact opposite. In Soiled with Earth, Drunk on Air I have no pretension to speak on behalf of nature, but rather I let the green of the leaves speak for me. Each poem is part of a branching whole. Thanks to those who read, that tree—which is nominally mine—can grow and the forest can spread further. Ideally, my book can open up a space in the spiritual landscape for someone else to walk.

The language in which this collection is written is natural in the literal sense. The bearer of this naturalness, in its strange beauty, is English. The coding of poetry in Soiled with Earth, Drunk on Air achieves its effects in the natural language of human reality, and remains foreign to the code of artificial intelligence and the false naturalness of its future in the art of words.

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“Melancholy”

Sometimes, when the nails on
the black claws of mountain ash

begin to bud, a melancholic
mood descends upon us and

our grandmothers’ wrinkles
begin to move before our eyes

with the ripple of smiles as if
they were living water. If we are

thirsty, the whole stream fits in
the cup of our hand; if we are

hungry, the wind feeds us with
the smell of a white deer’s blood.

“Staying On”

That body I have found
on a silver river shoal,

deposited like sand and
silt and pebbles—it is no

different from the coast
itself. It looks as if it has

either come out of nowhere,
or has been there forever.

That foreign body, ready
to enter me—like a splinter

stuck under my toenail
—says to me: stay on.

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From Soiled with Earth, Drunk on Air by Sibila Petlevski. Copyright © 2025. Available from Sandorf Passage.