Birth of an Emerald

Mother Earth carries his essence deep within her womb, amid a magma chamber for many a moon until the time comes for him to form. He’s then rushed out on a river of hydrothermal fluids that escape from the magmas. It rushes along the fractures and fissures of the rocks around. As it gets further from lava the fluids cool and solidify, filling the crevices and forming mineral veins. And if fluorine and beryllium both survived the ride then they bond to form the Emerald.

Realization

So today I finally realized why I was never taken seriously as a writer.

After attending a lecture by Robert Pinsky today, I came to realize what it means to create a strong work of literature. For one, I've always loved rhyming and after taking a "Craft of Poetry" class for just a week, I found out that rhymes tend to not me taken as serious as prose.
Pinsky gave an amazing lecture about how Translation = Misnomer. I never gave that much thought to translated version of literary pieces but it never occurred to me that people don't just translated as close to the original meaning as possible.
He was talking about his translation of Dante's inferno and how he "Englished it" by making it strong enough to give a different perspective that somehow gave insight into the original. I loved that he used the shield of Perseus as a parallel for translation. The story is that Perseus had to use the reflection of Medusa from his shield to defeat her. The reasoning is that since you can't see the original, the reflection is the best you've got, and if you can't read the original, the translation is your other option... unless you want to learn a whole new language!

Here's to improving my writing based on what I learned today!

<3 MM