Bil Sabab Power Hour - can't translate this one edition

Some poems just dont work in other languages even though you can retell the narrative without any losses of meaning and even reconstruct the method avoiding any significant distortions.

Such is this poem:

 

This is a poem written in Ukrainian. It goes like this: there is a series of words "an urge, an urge, an urge..." repeated way too many times, covering almost the entirety of a page only to be capped off with a simple phrase "Seizing a moment" (i'll tell you a story about that phrase next time). It seems beyond sanity, there is something very off deep inside and that is apparently tediously wicked.

The poem is very simple and yet it absolutely fails to click in a coherent way in English language. It lacks the intensity and depth it has in Ukrainian. And there is nothing you can really do about it. Just accept the fact that the only way you can experience this poem in English is through retelling and description. Which is rather curious way of experiencing poetry in its own right even though it is basically a null and void.

In Ukrainian this poem is rather intricate and sophisticated example of wordplay that tells a story of a whirl of feelings, thoughts and emotions boiling deep inside, almost coming to a surface and breaking out, rolling over and wrapping around a person in a tight suffocating knot until it comes to a point when this persons takes action. And that is where the poem stops because there is no reason to go on. You can think the rest on your own.

The trick is that the word "потяг" means two separate things in Ukrainian. One is "to pull", the other is aforementioned "an urge". It also means "a train" but there is no "train" in this poem unless you are into intentional mistranslations.

What comes out of combining these two very different meanings of seemingly one word is an gruelingly intense yet mesmerizingly minimal narrative of nondescripts swarm of urges tangled and warbling and bubbling inside and ultimately going out strange.

Here is an approximate translation: "An urge pulls an urge pulls urge pulls an urge... seizing a moment." or "To pull an urge to pull an urge to pull an urge... seizing a moment". It works both ways and it actually translates the meaning of the poem rather correctly. And yet it lacks that majestic faux repetitive grandiosity of Ukrainian original.

Here is why - in Ukrainian when you read this poem you realize that these are not one but two words. And yet - they look the same, they sound the same, they are the essentially the same but different and the cognitive dissonance of realizing this paradox wreaks havoc in the mind badly and it creates a whirlwind of doubts, confusion and perplexion of its own. The void erupts inside a reader and it takes him out of existence for a moment to comprehend this little wicked trick.

In English it is just a minimalist rhythmic phrase hollowed out of sense and sanitized to a simple statement that loops and phases to oblivion, scrambling and stumbling and falling apart in a dry mouth. And then it stops there is meh instead of void erupting.

And it is OK. English can't have all the nice things.