Anatomical Specimens Share a Scone
December 4, 2025
Joann and I were talking politics and relationships and fate over coffee. We agreed we both got impatient and irritated at not being able to better understand ourselves and our portions of the world, even after 60-plus and 80-plus years. I said the universe had given me this much of it, waving my hands at the length of my seated body, and it seems as if I should be able to understand more of that, at least, than I do. She laughed and said yes.
The problem is akin to what translator Brian Henry says in his introduction to Kiss the Eyes of Peace, selected poems by Tomaž Šalamun.
“Šalamun preferred literal translations of his poems,” Henry says. But, “The risk of entirely literal translations of poems is that they can seem more like artifacts than poems—what Paul Valéry called ‘anatomical specimens.’”
Wanting answers, we create reductions: I am. She was. The administration will.
Henry says that as a translator he has “kept in mind John Keats’s notion of negative capability—the ability to dwell in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’—while translating. This has helped me embrace ambiguity and resist the temptation to try to make more sense than there is in the original….”
The other night I kept waking to adjust the blanket, and weird dreams made me think I had not slept at all. In one I faced a vague threat but was able to fly, so I jumped up from the turmoil and flew into the safety of a cloud.
As I slid down its other side, like in some playground, I reached in and was surprised to take hold of a white cloth sewn in multiple layers. I grabbed it and tried to gather it up, but it would not bunch or come loose or be revealed. I thought it might be the hem of God’s robe, so I held on for dear life. I was not about to let certainty slip away again.
Even when I had both feet on the ground and sat under a tree, I seized the cloth so tightly my fingers hurt. After a while that did not seem as important, so I let my grip slacken; the cloth was still there. I took hold again to be sure I could, a couple of times, and when I finally understood I could do so at any time, I let it go. It was there and not there; it did not matter if I seized it.
On waking there was the usual irritable reduction: what had been cloth was nothing more than the stale edges of a vaporous cloud.
