Thanks for your gracious comments. Good to meet you too.

I read back over that link I provided about the translitic process, and it isn't as clear as I remember it being about the process. Thanks for the suggestion about posting to the SongWriter's section of the forum with more info about this process. I'll definitely put some material together and do that. I can also give some examples of how the lyric evolves from draft to draft.

Thanks again! Cheers!

For now, just in case you are interested in the translitic process and would like to give it a try, here's a bit of info that might be more clear:


A translitic (from trans, meaning across, and litic, meaning to cut or loosen) is a poem, song, or other writing "translated" from a foreign language by paying attention not to the meaning of the words but to how those words look or sound. The writer uses as a guide whatever homonymic/homophonic associations come to mind. So a line like "Un jardí d'hivern en un pantà de verns," (from a Catalan poem) might vaguely look or sound like "A yard of hives and a painting of ferns." or "A hardy diver and a painted delver." or "A hardy hive and a pattern of vines." For certain, this process is easier if you use a poem in a language you don't know. One of the most important things to remember about the translitic is that it is a process of revision; you are not finding “meaning” per se in the original foreign language poem; you are finding images, beautiful language, and relationships as you progress through each of your drafts.

The first draft of your translitic will have a dreamlike quality to it. It doesn’t need to make logical sense, nor does it need to make grammatical sense. In this first draft, you are assembling words and images, creating a landscape which you will explore in your later drafts. After you finish your first draft, put away the original foreign language poem and don’t look at it again.

The second draft of the translitic is where you begin to make “sense” of the dream imagery in the first draft. Here you begin to look at the relationship of the images and the language, and you begin to push the lines toward “meaning”--even if it is only meaningful in some emotional sense. After you finish your second draft, put away your first draft and don’t look at it as you write your next draft (you’ll repeat this process of only working with the previous draft each time.)

In the third draft, you continue to explore your text. At this point, you might want to begin measuring your lines by the number of syllables or stresses. Or you might want to choose a familiar melody--yours or someone else’s--and begin “measuring” the lines by singing your newly found words to this melody.

In the fourth and subsequent drafts, you continue to refine your images, write verses, a chorus, a bridge, etc. You might find that you only want to explore a subset of the stanzas you’ve created from the original foreign language poem. You can do that! You don’t need to cram the entire text into one song.



Originally Posted By: Tangmo
Wow. This is reminiscent of my favorite "country" period when the doors to were open to everyone. This folk-tinged piece iis timeless. The lyrics were captivating...definitely not "on the nose" but not so obscure I felt like an idiot listening. Beautiful poetry.

The band is right there and your voice is high and strong with that bit of fragility that moves.

I read the link earlier, but it didn't really explain the "process", nor did the author's examples read much like song-lyrics (though I don't think he was aiming for that). Please consider writing a bit about it in the "Song-Writers" part of the forum.

Good to meet you.

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