Posts by Jayde Will

Translation Tuesday: “With the Tongue” by Ivars Šteinbergs

Years later—truth or dare at someone’s place, no one chooses truth, we know everything we need to know anyway.

This Translation Tuesday, the Latvian poet Ivars Šteinbergs graces us with an ode to the tongue—the small, oh-so-easily forgotten organ without which language, and the institutions of literature and translation that depend on it, would be impossible. Drawing on the half-remembered frisson of youthful trysts, this humorous prose-poem ties the “games” of nascent sexuality to the generative “play” of language, brilliantly undermining the boundary between language and the body even as it strikes a balance between restraint and ribaldry.

I spin the bottle, it stops on Estere. I wanted it to stop on Sandra.

A small kiss, no tongue, mechanical, like you’re going through the motions during a dance lesson, afterwards I taste cherry lip balm. As far as the class trip, I only remember the ride in the bus, where in the back we had a circle around an empty Sprite bottle.

Years later—truth or dare at someone’s place, no one chooses truth, we know everything we need to know anyway: “Kiss Renāte—with your tongue!”, “Lick Anete’s neck!” “Touch each other with your tongues!”. The next morning—an oral exam, I hadn’t slept, but I got a good grade, as if I had been warming up for it the entire night before.

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