Here's something random, culled from among this summer's "deep dive" project, which was an exploration of issues for writers and translators in the art of translation itself. So I was reading interviews talking about that, like about what gets lost in translation, what it's like to translate something that's already a translation, how much stuff is translated that we don't even realize isn't brought to us in its original language, what happens when not only the language but the medium is altered and so on.
It was fun. Usually I just pick some country's fiction or poetry, or some particular author, and hang out there all summer, but this year's project was more ambitious and turned out to be a whole lot of fun, even if I ended up feeling more than ever like a jack of all trades, master of none by time I called it a season.
Anyway I stumbled into this bit by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and it's sticking with me:
"L'avenir pénètre en nous pour s'y modifier longtemps avant qu'il n'arrive lui-même."
Roughly: "the future changes itself from within us, long before it actually arrives."
So true, no? Whatever we believe is down the road for us can be infinitely subjective in scope and focus, and we are all capable of distorting our own future... not just because of what has happened so far in real life, but because of what we have chosen to make of that.
So much of literature plays off that very human theme. I feel like I have the edges of next summer's deep dive already, but I won't get around to planning the details until next spring.
