language transformation

June 15, 2004

I wonder how you say ‘jet lag’ in Italian. There should be a more beautiful word to describe why I am awake at this hour of glittering sunlight in a quiet city of red tile roofs and wrought iron balconies. I listen to conversations that sound foreign, yet familar, filtered through my understanding of Spanish, rather than any true grasp of Italian. It seems an odd translation. Not one of language, but it feels instead like a shift through a spatial transformation matrix, as if all languages could be visualized as surfaces in some n-dimensional space.

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