Finlay Worrallo on writerly intentions and the translation of ideas.

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In 2021, I wrote some poems about my perception of history for a publishing project called VIBE. I’m not sure if they’re the strongest I’ve written, but like sprouting seeds they’ve informed quite a bit of my subsequent work. They explored the question of how the future will respond to the present, and what it means to be part of a story that’s still being written. One contained these lines:

Prisoners of history, we all are bare-breasted
wooden mermaids, heads stuck out, eyes wide and wet
with spray, cutting a path through the unfolding blue,
breath-taken, blinded by the white foam of the present.

Now, these lines seem overworked. But overworked or not I managed to use words to crystallise a very particular image, and there’s little else I strive for as a writer.

I don’t always pull this off. Sometimes I have a clear image in mind and simply can’t find the right words to transpose it into a reader’s. For instance: the sun rising over you, a gold coin suspended mid-flip over your hand, two golden circles shining at each other. The side the coin will land on is undecided, and thus a metaphor for getting out of bed in the morning and not knowing if you’ll cry today. A solid enough image for a poem, but expressed in such meandering prose, it simply won’t do. Many times I’ve been stuck at my desk wanting to bang my brain against my reader’s, physically forcing the images over. I’m sure most writers and translators would sympathise: sometimes words are barely enough to carry our thoughts across the divide.

Borges understood the difficulties of transmuting ideas. ‘You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?’ he wrote in ‘The Library of Babel’. The line sends chills down my spine. To me, it speaks of the great contradiction of literature: how ideas can be transmitted almost endlessly and yet never the same way twice. Borges died 13 years before I was born, but his words echo in my mind and anchor my perception of language. Except when he wrote of the Library he saw a different one to the one I see when I read his work. There’s no replicating the images that flashed through his mind when he wrote – exactly how the soft lamps of the Library glow, how its staircases spiral off into the darkness – and there’s no replicating the ones that flash through my mind as I read. I build a different Library in my head, simply because no two people read a book the same way.

Since I first read Borges, I’ve found that his influence has reverberated through my work. The most notable example, oddly, was a project about intelligent isopods. I spent the better part of last year writing eight short stories for a collaborative chapbook called Unfurl: Portrait of Another World. Although physically slim, it was a sprawling work of speculative fiction that recorded a planet’s entire history, with the increasingly clear implication that the mysterious race living there, known only as the People, were giant woodlice. Without consciously intending it, my contributions became a series of reflections and meditations by various scholarly characters on journeys of discovery: classicists translating text, archaeologists uncovering artefacts, explorers wading into new territories. Reading my own work back, I concluded that what fascinates me the most, both as a writer and as a reader, is the very dynamic between writer and reader – an act of translation, as one individual attempts to decipher another’s thoughts across the divide. Trying to unpick everything crammed into a single image, maybe a single word.

I wrote in an intense, fixated state, picking details from my co-writers’ pieces to respond to. I wanted my translations to be part of a history, even if it was just a history we’d invented. It was my whole world while I wrote it. But now, a year later, my writing reads like the work of another writer to whom I’m now responding. To continue these pieces would be another act of translation.

Writing, reading and translating all seem to me to be variations on the same action, different aspects of the same process – a three-faced lamp that allows one to light up the darkness of past and future as though history were a spiral staircase sinking abysmally and soaring upwards above us in the Library.

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My tendency to historicise my own story goes back to starting a diary at 6. I’ve now reached a point where, experiencing a moment, I think as I experience it about how I’ll turn it into prose later, wondering whether to be pithy or sardonic or heartfelt. I suppose I have one eye on a future not yet written.

I’m not sure if thinking about how my future will react to my present allows me to bemore present, but it certainly makes me notice the details of history, from big things like issues dominating the news cycle to personal details like what I currently prefer for breakfast. I write these diaries as a dialogue with my future self, who I know will reread them to charter the unknown. My mood is no longer quite a coin tossed high to catch the sun – how I eventually translated that mental image – but it still helps enormously to look back on my younger self stressing about something and realise, with a jolt, that it all turned out fine long ago.

Writing allows me dialogue with my past. So, I write to be reread. I read to translate other writers’ words into my language and enrich my voice. And then I write in the hope of being translated in my turn. Reading this, you are translating my words into your language, forming a singular version of this essay in your head. I give you my thoughts in an attempt to guide yours in a particular direction, but ultimately your reading, your response, is yours and yours alone.

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Finlay Worrallo is a queer cross-arts writer studying at Newcastle University. Following a Modern Languages BA, he is now set to study a Creative Writing MA to focus on his art. He writes poetry, prose and scripts, and enjoys experimenting between and beyond established forms. His primary themes are the fluidity and flexibility of language, the relationships between things created and their creators, and the modern-day queer experience. His work is published in VIBE, Queerlings, 14, Ink Sweat & Tears, Impossible Archetype, Pennine Platform, the Braag’s speculative fiction chapbook Unfurl: Portrait of Another World, and the Emma Press’ anthology Dragons of the Prime: Poems about Dinosaurs.

Photo credit: Finlay Worrallo