Postcard

One idea that struck me from Kuppers’ book was the concept of translation in terms of telling stories and the question of how much one can really communicate through telling a story. She talks of “connecting the intensity with a larger audience,” which touches upon an issue that all writers face when thinking about the purpose of their writing and how they could bring across their message in the most effective way. It leads me to wonder how much Kuppers is actually “withholding,” not in the sense of deliberately keeping information from her readers for some ulterior motive, but in the sense that an author cannot communicate every detail of an experience accurately, so there are many aspects of the real life experience left out of the written story. The reader’s experience of a reading a story is much different than the author’s experience of the same story based on the way the author presents their words, in addition to the reader’s own preconceived notions and biases. Every reader will read every story differently. Usually, when I think of the word translation, I think of bringing words from one language across to a different language because the word “translation” literally comes from Latin words meaning “to carry across.” It is interesting to think of translating a story from an experience into writing because it is almost as if the physical, real-life experience is metaphorically a different language from the written story. In fact, in a way, an author is bringing across their memory of an experience into a new language, a written language. I think that this idea of translation when it comes to writing stories and trying to communicate feelings means that everyone’s experience of one single story can be different in so many ways.