Udugi Translation of a Meme

I saw this on Diaspora (posted by Morgonas and re-shared by Tony Langmach):

"All the power you will ever need is already within you."

I happen to agree with this statement. Here's how it would go in Udugi:

ᏂᎦᏛ ᎤᎳᏂᎬᎬ Ꮎ ᏂᎯ ᎢᏳᏊ ᎤᏚᎳᏙᏎ ᎨᏒᎠᏎ ᎦᏳᎳ ᏂᎯ ᎭᏫᏂᏗᏢ.

Image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.

The Visits

The visits to this poetry blog come from many countries. The graphic below, which is for the past seven days, is indicative:

Perhaps I should be writing this in Spanish, since the statistics are in Spanish, the language of my computer. Anyway, what you see here is pretty typical, and a picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. I do get visits from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but there is a decided bias toward first- and second-world countries.

An interesting thing, which I was able to see in this graphic for the first time, is that "Región Desconocida" ("Unknown Region") appears to be the contested, southern part of the Ukraine, currently occupied by Russia. I had thought that it was Russia proper, perhaps the Russian troll farm. Google has apparently not wished to take what could be interpreted as a political position on this issue, and I have no desire to do so either.

I have no doubt that various governments follow my writings, perhaps because they think that I will use the Udugi language, which is untranslatable by current translation programs, for political purposes. I will not.

I am a poet and photographer, a humanist, a feminist, and a spiritual person, and that's all that I am. I don't give a damn about Shakespeare's ". . . stage, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." They can have it, I don't want it.

I think that, at one time, the most popular feature of the blog was its nudist/naturist slant. That is still close to my heart, but the most popular feature now is unquestionably the Udugi language. This is a surprise to me, but I am happy about it, and believe that it will be my most enduring legacy.

I thank you all for your continuing interest and enthusiasm. Wadó. ꮹꮩ.

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.

The Universal Human Condition

Nothing has changed
for a thousand years,
though we now have running water
and electrons will soon replace gears.

The well-to-do do well--
the rest can go to hell.

Our world has shrunk to fit our phone,
while the spirit is left
to dance alone.

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

To See / ᎪᏩᏘ

To see well,
one must see deeply.

ᎪᏩᏘ ᎣᏍᏛ,
ᎠᏎ ᎪᏩᏘ ᎭᏫᏂᎮ.

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler ꮨᏺꭽꮅ.

The FaceBowdler

The FaceBowdler
knows no shame,
the FaceBowdler
plays a dirty game.
Hypocrite is
its other name.
This 'crite does faithfully
play its part
to banish freedom
and dumb down art.
Would-be Bowdlers
are silly ducks,
but this effin' monster
really Zucks.

--Pog Mohoin

Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

The Illustrations

The illustrations to my poems are often the inspiration for them, and become an integral part of them. The following case is an example of how it works.

The other day I was trying to get an old cell phone to work, and discovered that it still had 25 pictures on it. Among them were two nude selfies, taken in 2011. One of them interested me, both because it was from another time period and because it was so very ordinary. The old phone would not allow me to send or transfer the photo, so I photographed the screen of the phone. Here is the resultant image:

I then converted the photo to a gray-scale, black-and-white image, always the next step. In the process I adjusted brightness and contrast:

It is now a usable image, but still an unremarkable one. Another step is necessary to produce the high-contrast, virtual line-art illustrations that I use in the blog (both for aesthetic reasons and because they are easier to print):

This last step is a very delicate process, and can produce a wide variety of images from a single original. Suddenly we have a much more intense image, capable of inspiring a poem. In this case, it has the further advantage that it can now pass through social-media censorship.

Text and images © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

Note on Recent Poems

For some time now, I've been aware that my poems are getting shorter. This trend is not intentional, it's just what's happening.

Feeling a need to quantify things, I looked at my poetic output so far for the month of May. Skipping over prose and translations, there were eight poems. Their average length was 3.375 lines. Half of them were only two lines, and only one had more than four lines.

In addition to shortness, my poems are becoming more aphoristic and epigrammatic (no, I don't know how to say that in Udugi). I am, in fact, beginning to think of them as "dichos" (sayings).

Something has changed, but I'm not sure what. My poems are usually based on things that come to me, often in the middle of the night (I keep a notebook beside the bed). Sometimes they are inspired by my photography. The sources haven't changed, so I'm not yet able to explain the current, minimalist trend. Maybe someday I will be. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy it.

Thank you for being the loyal readers that you are.

Photo: Fergus McCarthy.