The Three Oddest Words

by | Wednesday, January 16, 2008

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.




I was introduced to Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry by a story on NPR. The one above is one of my favorites, playing as it does self-referentially with language. More examples of her poetry can be found here

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Personal | Poetry

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Acts of Translation

I recently finished reading three books: A case of Two Cities by Qiu Xialong, A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, and Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations by Alexander McCall Smith. These are three very different books. The first two are novels and the third is a...

Multiple representations of the periodic table and learning

Mishra & Yadav (2006) was a paper based around my dissertation research. It took a while to get published and I am including it here for the record. My dissertation (Mishra, 1998) was maybe the first place where I made a specific mention of the triad of...

On making computation visible

Here is a cool video about a "a mechanical, binary adding machine that uses marbles to flip the bits" - in other words a computer made of wood, that works at a pace that we can grasp! Marvelous. (HT: Collision Detection). Check out the video: [youtube width="425"...

Diwali 09 Photos

The Lansing temple recently organized a special Diwali program. My daughter Shreya participated in a dance and I, as always, took photographs of the event. Click here or the image below to see all 161 of the photographs I took. Enjoy. You can also read a poem written...

iPhones, higher ed & faculty resistance

Today's NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look "cool" to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of...

Website problems

My website has been facing all kinds of problems over the past few weeks. We have been working on figuring out what went wrong and trying to ensure that it doesn't recur - but it has taken a while and it's not clear to us whether we have it all figured out. So the...

Sliding into 2018

Sliding into 2018

Over the years our family has developed a mini-tradition of creating short videos to celebrate the new year. These videos are short, always typographical, and usually incorporate some kind of a visual illusion. Our craft has improved over the years, something that can...

Koehler & Mishra (in press)

Just for the record, Matt Koehler and I have a new piece in press. I should note that significant portions of this paper were condensed and updated from Mishra & Koehler (2007), with permission from AACE. Email me if you want a draft copy. The complete reference and...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *