Procrastinet: The Dadaist Poetry of Babel Fish

July 14, 2004

The Dadaist Poetry of Babel Fish

Here's some creative Procrastinetting: go to the Babel Fish translator, and play the phone game with a chunk of text. It makes for some great dada poetry.

Here, for example, is what happens when you translate the first two verses of Mary Had a Little Lamb from English into Korean and back:

The store maul li it was small
and the lamb it was it is small
there was a lamb, maul Riga
her the lamb positive and it went,
it was small and the young German silver
maul li his both hairs with the eye white
and or this maul Riga for maul of that
li for were small to where and the lamb,
maul Riga they went to where it is

Here is Hamlet's soliloquy, translated from English to Greek to French and back. It keeps up nobly for a while only to break down entirely by the end:

For qu'il either or qu'il is not, this one is the question. S'il is nobler with the brain for exist the slings and the arrows of the offensive chance, or for the weapons against a sea of the problems are received and, thanks to resistance, for telejwcoy'n

Then there's this rather beautiful piece, which is Jack and Jill into Chinese and back and then into Japanese and back. I think you'll agree it's an improvement on the original:

Jake and Jill
rise to the hill
in order to come
having the barrel water

Jake falling down
falls down

in order to come afterwards,
breaks that crown
and Jill

Eat yer heart out, William Carlos Williams.

Posted by rjt at July 14, 2004 04:32 PM

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