From time to time you can hear seagulls cry in the early morning, and I catch myself wondering, how far is the sea.


I woke up at the crack of dawn today, and way before my alarm clock was set up to wake me. My eyes flung open as though I'd been stirred abruptly, and I laid in bed with one arm over my face to check if I could fall asleep again for a few moments. Then the thought occurred to me that if I did drift to sleep again, I may end up oversleeping, and that thought got me up on my feet.

I have a tendency to procrestinate a lot. I do. I like to think things over and imagine them time and time again in all their possibilities and outcomes, from the most realistic down to the extremely far-fetched. If I'm meant to write something like a letter, for instance, I may spend days, if not weeks, imagining what I would write, imagining every word, weighing them in different combinations and appreciating their possible effects... Then one day I sit down and actually do what I'm supposed to do, and the best version becomes the one that stood out in my mind, the one I remember more strikingly so that it will simply flow out of me without much effort at all. All other options are phased out simply because my mind didn't find them worth remembering, perhaps. Or they proved to imperfect. Or something of the sort.

Other times I get caught up in the process of imagining all that may or may not be, all that may feel like or may not feel like, words that could be used or perhaps yet others instead... So much so and with such fervor that before I know it I have spent a long time dreaming a hypothesis away from concrete reality.

I was having a look at old things I used to write when I was younger. French words were dancing before my eyes and as I tried to translate them into English, I was horrified: it sounded horrid, nothing like the original flow, let alone rhythm and play of words. It's not that what I used to write was any good - far from it at times - it's just that I already used to write in a weird fashion even in my native language. I'd use refined words and then break the flow with a swear word or perhaps a 'loose' term, all the while never really following rules of poetry at all - only the rhythm in my own head. It worked in French at the time of writing them, but to dupplicate that in another language would require of me to slip right back into the exact state of mind I was in at the time so as to capture the full meaning I intended to convey, but this time in English.

I was listening to old French songs from the bygone times of my 'youth', and came across some old rap songs I used to listen to as a teen. One of them was inspired from Star Wars, except the meaning of the lyrics had little to do with the movies, but everything to do with a world embracing darkness, I suppose. It was called 'L'Empire du Cote Obscure', meaning 'The empire of the dark side' and a translation of the lyrics can be found here.

From there I came across another French rapper I used to listen to (with translation here), and I got to appreciate how he used to rap using quite refined words rather than your usual 'I kill you baby, come on, come on, come feel my pistol' whatever. With a few plays of words that are again quite hard to replicate in another language, but I guess that's the struggle translation always faces at times because each language will have certain turns or expressions rather unique to its own. A bit like jokes that are very funny in one language, but when you try to tell them to someone in another language, the other person fails to get it because they lack the deeper connection to the original words used and that made the whole thing funny in the first place.

How time flies... got to land back on Earth for now.