I’m going to outline here a general method that I think will help language learners as they approach a foreign language.

There are a few ways of communicating the essential sprit of this method. But I’d like to present it as essentially the process of creating a stepping stone language between a learner’s native language (the source language) and the language they are learning (the target language). What makes this approach easier is that this stepping stone language can be acquired more readily, because it uses only vocabulary from their source language while at the same time reflecting the grammar of the target language. Once readers have internalized this stepping stone language, they can then slowly begin to substitute the words they learn into it, until they are fully speaking the target language.

I first developed this system, which can essentially be understood as formalizing “interlinear gloss” into its distinct language-system, as an artistic method.

Language learning today generally begins with learners memorizing a substantial amount of vocabulary before even being introduced to the grammar. It’s exhausting and doesn’t lead to anything tangible, and learners are then doubly discouraged when they find out that learning to order the words correctly is its own and greater challenge. It can make a lot of language learners feel like they are performing a lot of labor for very little gain. I want this method to appear to learners like simply reading a strange book, not like generally learning anything at all. And by doing so, they’ll be doing the harder part first.

Another way I’ve communicated its essential sprit before is as a “hyper-literal” translation. A more academic version of that would be to call it a “morphological translation.” Morphemes refer to the smallest undivided units of meaning in a language.

The resource I’ve made below is something I made to help Spanish speakers learn English. And to do so, I’ve rendered a translation of the opening passages of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in this method, preserving all of the general formal rules of English but using only Spanish words.

If you are bilingual English-Spanish speaker, please look through the grammar rules I include at the end of this article and leave me any suggestions. I’d like to learn what sounds natural and unnatural to native Spanish speakers. I’d also be really interested in any suggestions from ESL teachers with mostly hispanic students.

El Viejo Hombre y El Mar

Why Hemingway? An Appeal to the Hemingway Estate

I’m going to make an ask here of the Hemingway Family and Foundation, as well as Simon and Schuster, who hold the translations rights to this book. If there’s a lot of positive feedback, and if a lot of native Spanish language speakers show interest in this being a potentially useful tool for them, please allow me the honor of creating a full translation of The Old Man and the Sea in this capacity. And please, let us make it accessible to everyone who would like to learn English through it.

I wanted to do this with Ernest Hemingway’s the Old Man and the Sea for a few reasons. Most intimately, I picked up this copy, written in Cuban Spanish, at the San Carlos Institute when I took a trip to Key West in the winter of 2024 into 2025, on my way back from visiting the Hemingway House. It was the first full-length fiction book I read in Spanish. And for that reason, it will always hold a special place in my heart. It feels strange now to read the book in English. It feels so at-home in Spanish.

And secondly, it is about a poor fisherman in Cuba, all of his losses and all of his triumphs. It doesn’t demean or patronize him. Hemingway imagined this man’s world as interesting, as dramatic, as complicated, and as bittersweet as his own. Hemingway saw himself in the every day working people of Cuba and saw them as ideals to aspire to. Ideals of diligence, and labor, and ambition.

I want this translation to not only be for Spanish-speakers but about them as well. If we wish for them to see the best in us, through all our misgivings, we must first show just how deeply we see the best in them.

But more fundamentally, Hemingway’s writing style, of sparse simple sentences, was almost made for learners. He has the capacity to talk about the most profound things embedded within human existence without needing to use more than a few sentences in an entire novel with more than three clauses. To me, this is as difficult of a book one needs to be able to read to be generally conversational in English. The simplicity of the language and the timelessness of its lessons has no rival.

Furthermore, if this will be an entryway to people learning English and learning American English, I want Hemingway to be the one to greet them at the gate.

Hemingway, in addition to being an American’s idea of an American, is also the rest of the world’s idea of an American. There is something to be said about Hemingway that can’t as easily be said about other authors: that understanding him, in some capacity, is to understand America. Our driving spirit, our reckless ambition, our silence in the face of our greatest private struggles.

So much ink has been spilled about Hemingway, in praise and in denunciation. So much ink has also been spilled about America, in praise and in denunciation. But none seem to be able to actually capture either’s essence. Perhaps their essences are far too complicated to be summed up as easily, by any singular emotion. We are a messy, complicated, often deeply misunderstood, but also mistaken, country. And just as America is all those things as a nation, Hemingway was as a man.

So please, let Ernest let Hemingway, who has guided us in so much already, be the one to hold the door open to a new generation of Americans. There’s no one greater and no one more deserving to hold the keys to the gate, to show everyone who wants to live a life here, that they are entering a land where dreams soar and where no one is ready to fall into their grave, until they are convinced, and they will never be convinced, that they have spent their entirety in the service of something much greater than themselves.

Translation Rules (So Far)

Verbs

Regular Verbs

Present tense:

To reflect English’s, sometimes truly puzzling, lack of inflection, the standard form of a verb (whatever follows ‘to’ in our fake infinitives like ‘to fish’), is represented by the full infinitive in Spanish.

The only exception is, of course, the third person singular. Here simply add an ‘s’ at the end of an infinitive.

Simple past:

Since English’s past participles are most commonly their simple past, I wanted to reflect that in the construction of the simple past. This way, Spanish speakers will know simply to reach for the past participle to get at the simple past.

I suspect some people will be disappointed by this flattening. The outstanding majority of all irregularities in English words happen in the past-tense. But the truth is, this isn’t something that I think I can take into account all the different ways in which they are irregular in a way that isn’t going to make this system as complicated as English itself.

Since irregular past tenses are already something English students spend a lot of time drilling, I’ll leave perfecting their tenses to the part of their language-learning journey after internalizing the regularities through this system.

Simple future

The simple future in English is made by simply preceding the regular verb form with ‘will’ or ‘shall’. So all this requires is for us to come up with a set phrase that indicates something naturally in the future in Spanish.

I went with: “va-a”

Present Participle Tenses:

All -ing constructions, whether the gerund or the present participle, use Spanish’s -ando/iendo endings.

We’ll get how to how ‘ser’ is conjugated below in the irregular verbs section.

Perfective Tenses:

Here is the translation for all the forms of ‘to have’ to construct any perfective tense

Irregular Verbs in the Present

Here are the conjugations for all verbs that are

Estar is dropped completely. All ‘to be’ conjugations are done through ‘ser’

To be

Since our other irregular verbs aren’t even that irregular, I’ll give very straightforward plug-in translations. These are meant to be valid whenever you see any of these verbs in these forms.

‘To go’

‘To have’

Modal Auxiliaries:

Negation Using ‘Do(es) not’

In order to negate any verb, we use a mirror of English’s auxiliary ‘do not’ construction.

Pronouns

Subject and Object Forms of Personal pronouns

English has many of the same generaly pronoun categories as Spanish.

Here are the subject forms

The object forms are

The object forms are a mix of the prepositional forms and the direct object forms (only for when a case arises in which Spanish re-uses the subject pronoun in its prepositional form as well; there’s also the case with English’s you, which is case-independent, so I just used ‘tú’.

Demonstrative Pronouns

Since Spanish has three distances (esto, eso, aquello) and English two (this, that), Spanish’s middle distance is dropped, which frees up ‘eso’ to be our general translation for ‘it,’ which Spanish needs because its pronouns don’t encode animacy.

And since English does not make a different between ‘this’ and ‘that’ as pronouns or demonstrative adjectives, neither will this system.

Because, Spanish distinguishes its possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns with more precision than English, all the instances in which they are the same, Spanish takes the possessive pronoun to mean both

However, the distinction remains intact where English also makes a distinction between the two.

English’s Genitive Case

the ‘ ‘s ’ in English’s genitive case is always rendered simply ‘-de’

Grammatical Gender

All grammatical gender is dropped. All gender-variable adjectives in Spanish take the masculine ending.

Prepositions

All instances in which any of these pronouns are used, they have a very direct translation within the system.

* I’d like some help on this one. I think it can work with ‘igual,’ but it feels to me like there must be a better fit for it.

‘As’ in English is used in a few contexts, but the two most prominent to my mind is for comparison and temporal constructions.

It sounds works for the former.

But it gets awkward with the temporal use

Please give me any suggestions.

Other points

• All instances of ‘to have’ get conjugated using ‘haber,’ which is a completely auxiliary verb in Spanish. The more general meaning of ‘to have’ is done by ‘tener,’ including ‘have to’ as an obligation. All of this gets flattened into ‘haber’ in this system to impress onto the reader that there is no distinction in English. I think it’s a better choice, since ‘to have’ and ‘haber’ are much more similar phonetically.

• ‘Estar’ is dropped completely. All ‘to be’ constructions are done through ‘ser’.

I think the idea that they can is useful to some , and has been used both by employers and employees for different ends at different times. I’m reminded of this very charming American Labor Movement poster arguing for a 40 day workweek.

But I don’t think the separation it tries to celebrate has ever been achievable. Time to yourself can never be fully detached from time spent elsewhere.

I feel like I’ve learned my body and its energy levels quite well. My most productive hours are the few hours after I wake up. And having to spend those in the train to work and then at work itself, on sometimes some of the pointless things in existence, was truly soul crushing.

For me, there was a unique torture in feeling the poetry flowing within me and having to draft some bullshit email or sit motionless in a meeting or have to type my ideas in a rush on my phone walking to work in the middle of a thousand other stressed-out New Yorkers. And by the time, I got home, that ocean of song would have inevitably fallen dead.

That being said, however, there are jobs I’ve had that have supercharged my writing with time. My first job out of grad-school was as an analyst at a hedge-fund, trading energy futures. I had a rough time in that role, but there were a lot of things I learned and had a rude awakening to there that I know have edified me as a person. I’ve thought of writing about it more directly, but I’ve chosen over and over not to, because I find parts of it everywhere else (everything from the math, which often involved subjects beyond my engineering curriculum like Complex Analysis, to everything I had to learn about humans and what becomes of them when they worship at the idol-altar of money).

I don’t think I would be half as interesting of a writer as I am now without having had to work as an engineer for several years now. I can think of a few other writers in this vein: Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Conrad etc. And I can think of a lot of contemporary writers who have a doubtless gift for expression but, because they are coddled nepo-babies and always have been, have nothing meaningful to say, because they aren’t trying to find poetry in the unspoken, only in the spoken-a-thousand-times-already. Nor would they know where to find the unspoken if given a map with it marked under an X.

I don’t believe there is a unity in the self. You are not one thing and never have been. You are an amalgamation of perceptions (chosen and unchosen) and subsequent thought processes all forced into a space where one can see the other, called the self. That said, however, because every part of ourselves affects every other, I do believe we all work better for ourselves when we consider ourselves a self. In the same way that teams work together with ample communication and when in unison towards the same goals.

Therefore, try to unify your work and your writing as best you can. Let one lean on the other, and let them unify in you as parts of a unified project. There are jobs for which this is obviously easier for and jobs for which this is obviously harder for, and there’s always going to be some level of dissonance between the two.

But I think that’s the only way for them to exist peacefully beside each other. Otherwise, they will always be in conflict because they have different needs, and one is always going to try and eliminate the other.

I’m not sure! I’m pretty the scholars don’t really know either. But it is strange that it has to be difficult. We don’t have the same difficulty representing information in very different ways in other contexts. So yes, there is something about language!

I think it’s because our consciousness and our capacity to communicate are deeply entwined. My belief is that our ability to perceive our own thoughts probably came about in order to, or was at least instrumental to, communicate. I don’t feel like we would have needed the fidelity to examine our thoughts that we do if we hadn’t needed to clearly communicate them. There are lot of other things our body is fine relegating to the completely unconscious. I feel this way because I’ve seen over and over again that I do not know my thoughts until I express them.

All this to state the obvious: that learning a new language is often learning an entirely new way of ordering your thoughts. It also changes the thoughts that are closer to you and within reach.

I think a reason ancient literary languages became liturgical so quickly (like Biblical Hebrew, Sanskrit, Quranic Arabic) is because people found that their thoughts automatically point more to God when thinking in those languages, because thoughts about God are all they ever heard expressed in that language! So it became a firewall, keeping regular thoughts, expressed most commonly in regular speech, out.

I don’t think language is thought and therefore God / Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) like a lot of Hindu as well as Christian and Jewish and Muslim sages have believed. But I do believe it is the best vehicle to examine thought. Learning a new language, at the very least, gives you an entirely new entryway into your thoughts.

Perhaps writers might be scared by this idea, but something I noticed happening once I started learning more languages well is that my internal dialogue got quieter. And now, I don’t hear it at all unless I want to. I remember how, when I could only really claim to express myself well in one language, how all my thoughts would come to me only as I would have expressed them in English. I would save images I saw with captions, which were the words that came to my mind when seeing that image. But after learning a few languages very well, I’ve found that thoughts no longer come to me in words. They come to as something more basic.

I think that more fundamental form of thought has always existed in me, beneath the words that used to make up my internal dialogue, but I suppose it lingers there without needing translation now that I have multiple avenues to express it. It allows me to linger on the raw experience of that for longer. But I also I find that it makes them more fleeting. I can fix them in place, of course, by translating them, assigning them words in one language or another, but that would be taking a photocopy of them. You lose information, compress it, when you do so and can’t always go back to the raw data as easily.

The benefits of learning a language on brain health are clearly demonstrated in the scientific literature, but I do think learning a language is in some capacity more fundamentally empowering for your thought processes than an equivalent activity that stimulates the brain as much but doesn’t force you to restructure your thoughts as fundamentally. I do believe it helped me unlock a greater level of abstraction in my mind. If there’s a double-blind controlled study with an impressive sample size that refutes that idea, please fold it into a paper airplane and fly it towards me. I will review it in my leisure.

Anywho, I don’t know why it’s hard. I don’t know why anything has to be hard. I don’t know why life has to come with its difficulties in order to be meaningful, but it does, and here we are within it, alive. So enjoy your thoughts while you can, in whatever language you can. They’re all you have. You have never experienced anything outside of your thoughts.

In terms of advice on learning languages, do as the Youtube videos with thumbnails such as “This One Insane Language Learning Trick Changed My Life! (100% Fluent Native Accent)” say you must do. Most of it is good advice for people who are very lost and don’t know where to begin.

But a piece of advice I would give, and which they rarely do, is this: learn your own language first. Try to find a course dedicated to teaching your native language to non-natives. That, surely, can’t be intimidating! Learn the names of all the tenses and parts of speech you use every day but never even really thought had a name. Once you’ve done this, it’ll be easier for you to understand the structure of another language, because at least now you’re familiar with the structure of your own. Expect to rethink so much of your own thoughts as you do this. You’ll already find yourself investigating your thoughts deeper as you do this.

Recursive thoughts, thoughts about thoughts, thinking about thinking, in Cabalistic Judaism as well as Buddhism and pretty much all branches of Non-Dualistic Hindu Philosophy, are considered the bedrock of spiritual thinking. And perhaps, you need to join us, on this side of the river of language, to see why we say so.

Language is such a beautiful tool. If I ever had to re-write Genesis, I would have Eve grasp for the fruit of knowledge and Adam grasp for the fruit of language to express that knowledge. I don’t think one would have reason to exist without the other. I think it was the utility in expressing our perspective that made it important to have a perspective, thus creating the self, thus pushing us out of Eden, into this strange fugue state called consciousness, where we see the Dao, and the world and Spinoza’s God, unfolding continually before us but can no longer simply be a part of it, here where we feel we must ask questions about its every turn, even though we know the true reasons for things are indelibly beyond us, and always will be.

That sounds like a beautiful project! I still remember when my mother told me the story of Kannagi as a child and reading the Amar Chitra Katha comic book retelling of it.

If you want courage, I would meditate on just how beautiful and transgressive of a story it is and how lucky we are as Tamil people to have it as one of our founding poetic works.

I won’t say it’s progressive in our modern sense, but the way it represents female anger as purifying is something that would still disturb, let’s say, more “traditionally minded” people. And paying attention to women’s anger instead of dismissing it outright is still something we struggle with.

But I think more fundamentally, like the Bhagavad Gita says: all you’re entitled to is your labor, not the rewards you imagine coming from it. So lose yourself in the labor, and try to find it fun and exciting for its own sake. Don’t fixate on it as a finished project, and soon you’ll have something beautiful.

Thank you so much for the thoughtful question!

Firstly, obviously the solution to burnout is rest, but I think rest is a lot harder than people imagine. What I’ve figured out, for me is that feeling truly rested hinges on I) my physical body feeling stable (like it’s eaten enough, got enough sleep, etc.) and 2) my desire to get back to work and my capacity to find it interesting

I’ve found that taking time away from work only achieves the first. I’ve discovered that, for me, rest needs to be active. It needs to be something that’s tiring in its own way: time spent on an activity I’m excited to make progress on, but which is unrelated to what I’m burned out from.

Something that worked for me is giving myself a “Shabbos” haha, one day a week in which I don’t allow myself to work on my your tasks and instead spend it in active rest.

As to the second question: that feeling will never leave you. There’s a letter Steinbeck wrote to a friend where, even after multiple best-sellers, he still remains riddled with self doubt. There’s a beautiful book called “Of Course You Always End Up Becoming Yourself” that goes through the same journey with David Foster-Wallace.

You have to give yourself the hope that it’s worth the time and labor. It’s a hope you have to find for yourself.

There is no lasting source of external validation to give it to you. So just believe that your work is beautiful, and if you believe it, and don’t forget to believe it, I think, that feeling will soon disappear in time!

Here are some of the things that I do to show my process.

1. I’ve been slowly moving all my existing projects to, and especially starting all of my new projects on, online platforms that automatically and actively keep version history

   • The most accessible software for this is probably Google Docs

   • Docs doesn’t seem to have a set regularity for recording versions, which is disappointing. But looking through my personal docs, Google does seem to save a version every few minutes, even when you’re actively writing. I think this well meets most reasonable thresholds.

2. For the works of mine that I prefer to keep on my machine, I make sure to upload the project to Drive, as a new revision, after every substantial working session.

   • This is mostly the case for me right now with my larger project, because I’ve moved to using the software Scrivener, which I’ve found very useful for drafting large manuscripts.

   • I save a version of it every night after I’m done writing to my Google Drive folder.

   • When you’re uploading to Drive, make it sure to save it as a new version. Make sure all your previous versions that are still safe and ready to be reviewed if needed.

   • I think having different versions and different drafts on your personal computer is still better than having nothing but a magical final draft that is here with you inexplicably. But it’s important that your versions are always being saved and recorded by a third party.

3. I save every single one of my notes, physical as well as digital

   • Signing and dating all your physical notes is always a good practice.

   • I would also consider archiving notes the same way I suggested above for draft revisions.

     • For clarity, I currently don’t do that, since it might be a lot of work for random Notes App scribbles.

     • I think a good system would possible be iCloud backups that get taken for Notes in particular at a more regular frequency than for other apps. I’m not sure how feasible this is natively with Apple.

4. I save all of my correspondences about my projects

   • This includes emails where I sent earlier versions of the draft to others.

   • This includes text messages where I’m telling a friend about an idea for a project I have.

5. Make your A.I policy clear on a public-facing profile if you have one so that there’s never any ambiguity.

   • I publish mine below.

6. If you do use A.I as a research tool, you need to be open to publishing all your chats

Tech People, Please Give Us Your Suggestions

Whenever a tech person hears “Version History,” they probably don’t think about Google Docs. They probably think about a software named Git.

Git is the main tool that coders use to keep track of their version history, especially when collaborating in large teams.

I’ve tried to make my process work with Git before, but it’s difficult because many of these files (like .docx) are saved in binary and/or contain a lot of meta data.

Below is my suggestion for software that could help writers through this moment in time. If you know a software that already accomplishes much of what’s outlined below, please tell me.

A Writer’s Versioning Software needs, at minimum, to be able to do the following:

• Upon a user’s “commit,” which we tech people should think of as a “commit-and-push".

  • Take the user’s dot docx, dot scriv, or dot whatever file,

  • Convert it to a text-only form if needed,

  • Strip it of its meta data,

  • Commit the changes made to the text,

  • Include the meta data in a separate versioned file,

  • Commit the meta-data to a parallel branch for auditing purposes,

  • Push the branch changes to a remote repository in an audit-level storage solution.

    • I know that AWS Glacier has a few storage options available that are explicitly greenlit for legal and auditing purposes.

If this has been a useful outline for a product you’d now like to engineer, please run wild with this. Just give me credit for the idea/outline. I care most that it gets built.

I have a technical background as a data engineer and could feasibly work on something like this, but I think it’ll take the time and effort of someone more dedicated to tech projects than me. Especially since this is going to be something with very large security demands, this isn’t something I’d slop-code.

Every possible security vulnerability is going to require a lot of human attention. We cannot have sloppy software that ruins people’s writing versioning history. It could be what gets or doesn’t get them published. It could be what gets them branded as a slop-writer or an artist.

Unless we’re able to provide availability and security guarantees on par with the big tech companies (on whom we might anyway depend on for a lot of the back end anyway), this isn’t worth doing in the slightest.

Where I Think We’re Headed As Writers and Publishers

I think we’re moving to an audit-based system for writers. Or at least, I think, it’s the system that would make the most sense currently.

I think literary agents and publishing houses need to be kind to writers about this, but I do believe they need to slowly start making it an expectation that, when you submit a work to them, you need to agree to potentially being audited if there are valid suspicions.

I think a worse version of this, which would be easier for agents/publishers but crueler to writers, is an expectation that writers need to collate and present substantial proof of work before submitting. Collating that would be its own week of labor, so thanks, A.I.

My A.I Policy

I have never and will never use A.I as anything more than a research tool for all my creative writing projects.

I will never use A.I to make a creative decision for me. In the context of writing, I consider any visible mark on the manuscript (including the words, down to the punctuation marks, and anything in between) to be a creative decision.

I also have never and will never use A.I for any creative process. This includes generating ideas, outlining, or brain-storming.

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Time moves slower in New York City,
Amid the rushing crowd, in those moments you can see

The faces of a hundred people in a single breath.
Here, amid so much life, here you feel so far from death.

Here among a thousand souls all like yours, caught up in life's 
   restless gale,
Here where, if you attention pay, each may stop to tell you a 
   tale:

A tale of victory or a tale of strife,
A story about this moment in their life,

Told by the expression on their face,
Or the pace of their walk, but each a tale full of grace.

So I walk not too slow, reminded that each life holds a universe 
   within,
Reminded that to ignore beauty presented before you is a sin,

Reminded of how thankful I am to witness before me a city 
   like this unfurled,
This city in a rush to become the world,

Reminded how beautiful it is just to roam
Through a city that promises all mankind a home.

Here in New York, you learn how best to be alone, 
Here where you can leave behind your phone, here where you won't need an uber to drive you home,  
Here, among the packed express-uptown and local-downtown rushing subway cars,
Here, you can simply disappear into the city's iron veins, and let it take you to where you can forget all that forgetting needs, no matter how far.

It's here where you give into your desires for a season, chasing it down every promise-laced alley;
It's here where you learn how right Ibn 'Arabi was to say that desire is like water from the sea,
That the more you drink of it, the more you thirst. And so, it's here where you learn to let it go,
Here where you spend the season that follows desire learning how to simply be in the world alone.

It's here you learn that you’re as capable of breaking hearts as you are of having yours broken,
Here where you reflect continually on the meaninglessness of all of love's momentary tokens,
Here where you try to understand how someone could hold her face an inch from yours for all the minutes of this hour and the hour that comes anon,
And still leave you only with everyone, from the bodega guy to your oldest confidants, asking you where your signora has gone.  

It's here where you find a park in a neighborhood far from home,
Somewhere you and your forlorn love's ghosts-and-memories never roamed,
And find a space within it, under a tree's rustling shade, to melt into the world.
Here, you close your eyes and simply let your thoughts swirl; here you sit, waiting for all your questions' answers to slowly unfurl.

Here where you melt into misery for a moment, as a Strokes song rings an old unfulfilled wish through your mind,
"Can I waste all your time on the sidewalk? Can I stand in your light for just a while?"
   
But it's also here where a child in Morningside Park, as evening nears, calls you out of your despair
And asks if you, from your greater height, could throw their kite in the air.

And it's here where you suggest instead that they sit on your shoulder and throw it themselves, 
And so, take them, high and light o'er your epaules, as you yourself stand on a park bench,

And watch them throw their kite against the rushing wind as, by and by, it comes by,
And turn, turning them on your shoulders as you do, to watch that kite fly against the bright, evening-painted sky.

It's here you wave goodbye, and take the train home, 
Reminded of just how much you want children of your own. 

It's here where you learn that the mystics, when speaking of desire, were only ever wrong  
When they said that it serves no purpose at all.

Here, amid so much life, in this city dedicated solely to its celebration,
Here, you can’t help but find your way back to the roads that promise its creation.

Here, you relearn to love the tantrums and caprices of your heart; 
Here, you learn to point it, as it waits for love, to more deserving things: like its art.

Here, you learn to slowly give yourself again the space,
To come back to what makes this life worth living in the first place.

   O New York, this night let me hear you sing, and just to pass the time, 
   Please tell, which center of the world were you in another life? 

   Were you Rome? Where Galicians, Iberians, Saxons roamed, and hated each other at first, but knew in time 
   That the name of Rome was greater than all those of their smaller tribes, 
   And so, came together, and in doing so, gave up all their petty hubris and pride? 

   Were you New Istanbul, old Constanipole? Where Turks and Arabs and Europeans each came and left their mark?
   Remaking that same sepulcher of divine wisdom into a barracks, then a church, and then a mosque?

   Or were you Cochin, on India's Malabar Coast? Where to this day, upon a single street, 
   You can find the temples and homes of thousands of old refugees?
   Syriac, Catholic, Methodist Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Parsis?

   Were you Alexandria? Where Greeks, Judeans, and Egyptians came and each other's songs all sung?
   And translated all of each other's greatest works into Koine, the common tongue?
   Whose core, undoubted, from Macedonia came, but who, by loanwords from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Egyptian-soon-to-be-Coptic, was kept young?

   Were you Nishapur, where Chinese and Indian merchants stopped, and sold their wares, along that road paved with silk? 
   So many that girls in Iran a thousand years later, to be named "Beautiful," are still named Hind?
   Because all they knew of the people that lived east of the River Sindh was that they possessed beautiful things?
 
   O' Old New Amsterdam, New New York, will all this someday end? Can you say? 
   Will the barbarians at our gate truly succeed at the end of the day?
   And convince us that unity among men can only exist if we are all the same?

   O, New York, even if so, I know you will be born again, in another generation or in another land,
   That humanity shall not rest until it finds complete unity in man.

This is a translation form / verse type that I first made to translate into English phrases or expressions phrases from Tamil (one of the languages I grew up speaking) that I found beautiful, but whose beauty I couldn’t always find a way to fully represent in standard translation.

The verse form essentially attempts a morpheme-by-morpheme translation from a source language into something English-intelligible, using exclusively English vocabulary.

Growing up in Kuwait, with a substantial Egyptian diaspora, I heard Tamally Maak played on street constantly, throughout my childhood. I always considered it a deeply touching song and a beautiful tune, one that is explicitly modern while still preserving the true, tender, lovingly aflame heart of Arabic poetry that I admire in the great poet-sage’s of Islamic antiquity (I think of Ibn ‘Arabi in particular).

Translation

1. Always (I am) with-you if even (you are) far from-me, in heart-my love-yours (is) 1

2. Always with-you, always in mind-my and in heart-my, and-no ever-always-I-forget-you2

3. Always (I feel you) absent-me, if-no even ever-always-I-be-with-you

4. (CHORUS) Always beloved-my, ever-always-pine-I-for-you; always eyes-my call-for-you, even if surroundings-my all the-world (is), O beloved-my (I) need-for-you

5. Always with-you, with-you heart-my (is), with-you soul-my (is), O more-beloved (than all)5, O more-beloved (than all)

6. And however you-be far from-me, to-heart-my (you are) close

7. O lifetime-my 3, the-coming and the-existing4, O more-beautiful (than all) fate

8. (CHORUS) Always beloved-my, ever-always-pine-I-for-you; always eyes-my call-for-you, even if surroundings-my all the-world (is), O beloved-my (I) need-for-you

Notes

¹ Starting out, to ease the reader into the form, I’ve chosen to include parenthetical copulas. A copula is a linking verb, one can associates two elements together. The copula in English is most often the verb “to be.” In English, (French, Spanish etc) we would say “Yeshaya is cool / Yeshaya est cool / Yeshaya es cool”. Arabic (and Tamil etc), an explicit copula can be added for clarity but is most often left out in regular speech. Something like “Yitzchak cool”

² Here I made the choice to translate Masri’s non-present habitual marker (b’-) as “always-ever”. While ‘always-’ would act as a good habitual marker for a strict future tense, and ‘ever-’ would act as a good habitual marker for a strict present tense, I chose to concatenate the two to preserve the ambiguity of the non-present tense.

A standard translation here would have required me to collapse the ambiguity of the non-present tense into either the present or the future tense. Even though in most situations context allows for a clear choice to be made when translating into English, this line is a good example in which preserving the ambiguity allows for a deeper poetic reading. Is he stating that he is currently choosing never to forget his beloved, or is he choosing to never forget her in the future? Perhaps both? Perhaps something in the middle? Isn’t it lovely that, since the source text doesn’t make a choice, the translation doesn’t have to either?

³ The word in the original Egyptian is “omr,” which actually more literally translates to “age.” For example, if you ask someone how much their omr is, that would be you asking how old they are.

So where most translations would translate it as “my life” I write “lifetime-my” in order to preserve that temporal aspect and also to reflect the fact that the morpheme that indicates possession is added to the word as a suffix in Masri and most dialects of Arabic (that I know of… gulp)

On a poetic note, I like how it opens the translation to a reading that hold the idea of the time of one’s life is what’s valuable, not some more abstract idea that one still happens to be alive. “My life” isn’t worth (to me lol) as much if I’m going to die the next second (so hopefully I don’t <3).

⁴ Here is where so many translation would just translate it as “ the future and the present” or, which would be worse, by enforcing English’s preferred ordering “The present and the future”.

The reason I chose to write it as “the-coming and the-existing” is because in Masri, the words are both active noun participles, essentially something like English’s gerund construction “-ing”. Translating it this way allows the idea of the present and the future to feel more active, as things that are actively occurring, either actively arriving from the once-future or choosing to actively exist in the present. As someone who loves stuffing his prose with active verbs to give phrases a feeling of continuing action, this is something I just had to do.

It also reminds me of French, in which the most standard word for “future” is “avenir), a collapsed form of “à venir”, literally “to come”. Spanish speakers will also be able to recognize something similar in “porvenir” but the meaning is more distant, and it’s not the standard word for “future.”

⁵ In Masri, the superlative (e.g ‘best’) is constructed by simply placing the comparative (e.g ‘better’) without a comparison marker (‘than’). People may be familiar with very similar constructions in French and Spanish where to call someone the most beautiful, construction is “La plus belle / La más bellisima” literally “The more beautiful”

The Standard Translation

Below is the standard translation and the transliteration from Masri. I am far too rusty with my Arabic script to make sure that I don’t mess it up when porting it over here. But I know you guys prefer it like this anyway.

Here are the sources for the English translation and the transliteration. Thank you to Mostafa from Friday, June 3, 2011 and Dr. Tahseen Alkoudsi respectively!

1. Always with me; even when you are away from me, your love is in my heart.

2. Always with me; always on my mind and in my heart; I never forget you.

3. Always missing you, even when you are with me.

4. I always long for you, my love; my eyes always call for you; even if the whole world surrounds me, I still need you, my love.

5. Always with me; you have my heart and my life; my dearest love.

6. No matter how far away you are, you are close to my heart.

7. O' My life, my future and my present; my most beautiful destiny.

8. I always long for you, my love; my eyes always call for you; even if the whole world surrounds me, I still need you, my love.

The Original Masri

1. Tamalli maa’aak walaou hatta baa’eid a’aani fi aalbi hawaak

2. Tamalli maa’aak tamalli if- baali iw-if aalbi wala bansaak

3. Tamalli wahishni laou hatta bakoun way-yaak

4. Tamalli habeebi mihtajlak; Tamalli a’aiynayya tistahlak, Walaou hawalayya killi ilkoun bardhouh yahabeebi mihtajlak

5. Tamalli maa’aak, maa’aak aalbi, maa’aak rouhi, ya aghla habeeb, ya aghla habeeb

6. Iw mahma itkoun baa’eid a’anni, li-aalbi areib

7. Ya omri elgaay wilhaadher, ya ahla naseeb

8. Tamalli habeebi mihtajlak; Tamalli a’aiynayya tistahlak, Walaou hawalayya killi ilkoun bardhouh yahabeebi mihtajlak

Note to Literary Agents

I end all of the content I make about my hyper-literal verse form with a call to any literary agents watching/reading.

I have a manuscript nearing completion in which alternating passages are written in a similar experimental verse form, combining English vocabulary with Tamil syntax and morphology. I myself grew up speaking Tamil and English at home.

Its first chapter has already been published in The Black Warrior Review’s 2026 Summer Edition (and they didn’t even know about its linguistic origins until after they accepted the submission; I suppose they just felt it naturally poetic).

In my view, Tamil makes for much better reading in this kind of morpheme-by-morpheme translation, because of its agglutinative nature. Performing it in person in the underground poetry scene in New York always edifies my belief that most English-language speakers are able to follow along effectively, with effort but without great issue.

Below is a brief synopsis of the novel.

America Is The World tells the story of Narasimha, a young man as he first comes of age in rural Tamil Nadu. There, his frustrations grow with the prejudices and suffocating social norms, particularly around love and relationships, of his homeland. There he dreams idly of one day living in America, a land he has only seen on television and in movies, a land he dreams is free of prejudice and hatred—a land where he believes love blooms free.

When his life in Tamil Nadu begins to fall apart, he accepts a coyote smuggler’s offer to bring him to the United States, where he is promised work as a meat packer. He accepts the offer, but he soon discovers that his new home is far from what he imagined. Made to work 12-hour shifts for months on end with only a few hours of sleep each night, the physical toll as well as the emotional disassociation required to slaughter animals on an industrial scale soon begin to pull apart his consciousness, as he begins to self-medicate with hard drugs.

Through his journey, he comes to find the beauty and the horror in the American dream. Although it tells a painful story of immigration and disillusion, the work never lets go hidden its love for this land and its people.

The novel is far from auto-biographical, but it mirrors my own story with America. I have come to love America more than most Americans can understand, as someone who’s had to fight for every squared inch of his place within it.

Ending Note

I have learned humility in my life, so I’ll place this here and never repeat the thought again unless asked, but if people choose to take this verse form to places I haven’t yet dreamed of and wish to give me naming rights, I’d ask that the specific name for this kind of verse to be called “Senthil-Kumarian Hyper-Literal Verse/Translation.”

Tamil last names are patronymic, so that’s actually my father’s first name, but coming to America, I’ve accepted that it’ll forever be understood as a surname. If at times it gets attributed to my father, so be it. He is an unceasingly kind man. What little I have to offer the world, I have inherited its seed from him. I’d be happy to name it in his honor.

This is a translation form / verse type that I first made to translate into English phrases or expressions phrases from Tamil (one of the languages I grew up speaking) that I found beautiful, but whose beauty I couldn’t always find a way to fully represent in standard translation.

The verse form essentially attempts a morpheme-by-morpheme translation from a source language into something English-intelligible, using exclusively English vocabulary.

Ecclesiastes (or Koholet) tells the story of King Solomon as he enters old age and reflects on all the endeavors of his life, slowly coming to terms with the meaningless of all things. There are no easy religious answers it tries to present. It’s a true work of art in how its greatest offerings to us are questions, not answers.

I’ve remarked to my friends on a few occasions that I sometimes think of my life before Ecclesiastes and my life after Ecclesiastes. There are whole categories all of my past behaviour that I remember from time to time and then think to myself, “It’s alright. That was before I read Ecclesiastes.”

I think the only other book I can saw that about with as much confidence is Tirukurral.

Translation, Hyper-Literal

1. Words-of Assembling-he, son-David, King in-Jerusalem 

2. Mist-(and)-Mists, said-he Assembling-he, the-all (is) mist

3. What profit (is there)  for-the-human (for-the-Adam) in-all toil-his that-will-he-toil under the-sun?

4. Generation going-he and-generation coming-he, but-the-land for-forever standing-she 1

5. And-will-he-rise the-sun and-returning-he, and-to-post-his returning-gasping-he. And rising-he he there (again)

6. Going-he to-south and-turning-he to-north, turning-he turning-he the-wind 2, and-on-circuits-his returning-he the-wind

7. All-the-monsoon-river-wadis going-they to-the-sea, (but) the-sea being-not full. To-post that-the-monsoon-river-wadis going-they, there they returning-they for-go (again) 

8. All-words-things growing-weary, no-will-be-able-he any-man to-be-spoken. Not-to-be-made-full the eye to-see (is). And-not-to-be-made-full the ear from-to-hear.

9. What-that-became-he is that-will-he-be, and-what-that-was-done-he is that-will-he-be-done. And there-exists-not all-new under the-sun.

10. There-exists word-thing that-will-say-he "See-this! New it-is." Already was-he, in-ages that from-before-us (from-to-faces-our).

11. There-exists-not memory for-the-first; and-also for-the-laters that-will-they-be, no-will-he-be for-them memory be-will with to-the-last.

Notes

¹ One theme that I saw so clearly in the original Hebrew that obviously cannot be translated into English is the gender of the nouns that the speaker chose to use. I think it comes out, using my pidgin-translation the clearest here. Where the choice of word (generation / דּוֹר / dor) to describe people as they come and go are masculine, but the word for the earth or the land is feminine.

It really does feel to me like there’s a small commentary there about men running around with their heads on fire, driven around by burning existential dread to make their lives meaningful, while the women are so much more capable of finding peace and stability amid the meaningless of existence, which is clear to them as well.

Other instances in this passage that, I feel reflect this, is Line 6. There the word for “circuits” is in the feminine plural form. My pidgin system for Biblical Hebrew encodes noun plurals, like English, independent of gender, so it isn’t reflected even in my translation above. I want to find a way to pull out those hidden gender markers while still preserving the poetry of the text.

I wish there was another example of this phenomenon in the above lines to make this gendered dynamic clear, but I’ll leave it by noting that all of the nouns chosen to mirror the going and coming and futile nature of existence (the sun, the wind, the rivers) are all masculine. And when the place they return to that is stable also happens to be masculine (the sea is a good example), they are written to avoid any explicit gender marker. Contrast this with the “land”, which is given a verb so that her gender is made clearer.

² One thing that stood out to me when reading it in original Hebrew (and perhaps it could be and this could be an indication of just the fact that it was much harder for me than reading it in English), but the feeling of exhaustion is just so much more clearer in the original text. The King James, for example, instead of repeating the verb as is done in the original Masoretic, it just says “whirling about continually”

King James Translation

Here’s the King James Translation of the same 11 lines to help you follow along if you need!

1:1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

1:2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

1:3 What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

1:4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

1:5 The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

1:6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

1:8 All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

1:10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

1:11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

Note to Literary Agents

I end all of the content I make about my hyper-literal verse form with a call to any literary agents watching/reading.

I have a manuscript nearing completion in which alternating passages are written in a similar experimental verse form, combining English vocabulary with Tamil syntax and morphology. I myself grew up speaking Tamil and English at home.

Its first chapter has already been published in The Black Warrior Review’s 2026 Summer Edition (and they didn’t even know about its linguistic origins until after they accepted the submission; I suppose they just felt it naturally poetic).

In my view, Tamil makes for much better reading in this kind of morpheme-by-morpheme translation, because of its agglutinative nature. Performing it in person in the underground poetry scene in New York always edifies my belief that most English-language speakers are able to follow along effectively, with effort but without great issue.

Below is a brief synopsis of the novel.

America Is The World tells the story of Narasimha, a young man as he first comes of age in rural Tamil Nadu. There, his frustrations grow with the prejudices and suffocating social norms, particularly around love and relationships, of his homeland. There he dreams idly of one day living in America, a land he has only seen on television and in movies, a land he dreams is free of prejudice and hatred—a land where he believes love blooms free.

When his life in Tamil Nadu begins to fall apart, he accepts a coyote smuggler’s offer to bring him to the United States, where he is promised work as a meat packer. He accepts the offer, but he soon discovers that his new home is far from what he imagined. Made to work 12-hour shifts for months on end with only a few hours of sleep each night, the physical toll as well as the emotional disassociation required to slaughter animals on an industrial scale soon begin to pull apart his consciousness, as he begins to self-medicate with hard drugs.

Through his journey, he comes to find the beauty and the horror in the American dream. Although it tells a painful story of immigration and disillusion, the work never lets go hidden its love for this land and its people.

The novel is far from auto-biographical, but it mirrors my own story with America. I have come to love America more than most Americans can understand, as someone who’s had to fight for every squared inch of his place within it.

My running joke with my friends Yitz and Yeshaya is that they’ll throw me a Bar Mitzvah once I earn a literary agent to represent this book. If you live in New York, dear literary agent, I’d be more than happy to invite you.

Notes of Infinite Thanks

Thank you so much to my dear friends Yeshaya and Yitzchak. This would not have been possible without your help. Thank you for your patience with me, even onto the late night. Without you, I would have gone mad trying to understand what AI slop I could trust and what AI slop I couldn’t. I don’t know what austerity I’d performed in a previous life to be given friends who could so effortlessly explain the grammar of Biblical Hebrew in their apartment over beer.

The two of you have helped me through so much in life already, before I had even considered asking you for help with this.