I understand you...kinda.

“I want to understand you, I study your obscure language.” This quote, written by Bakhtin, leads to a lot of psychological thinking in response to the idea brought up. Through this quote, Bakhtin is giving language a lot of power. I agree with this idea, I feel like to truly understand someone, especially something written, understanding its language to the fullest will benefit you. If I sat down and read something written in Spanish and had to constantly use a dictionary to translate words, I would not get nearly the same effect from it as would a native speaker.

Applying this idea, while reading stories such as the Trickster story or the poem by A. R. Ammons, in order to fully grasp the ideas conveyed, one must also fully understand the language both culturally and linguistically used. The Trickster story is an orally passed down story told by Native Americans to their children, to teach them many things about life. The use of the word defecate is quite interesting, being that the story is about shitting, but the word used is defecation. Why would the more prim and proper word be chosen when we all know it’s referring to shit? Obviously, there must be something lost in the translation that can only be understood when heard in the original language.

As for the A. R. Ammons poem, which spends the entire song talking about different types of shit, it’s a little bit more difficult to understand what language I should be understanding. The original text is in English, so I’m not really sure. I do know that the poem is full of hidden meanings besides just different types of shit. The author uses the very versatile nature of the word to create sayings such as “Bull shit (the classic)” as well as “Gopher shit (or go broke)”. I’m sure there are many more that I did not catch, but all in all it’s a very humorous piece.