Everyone knows the phrase "lost in translation," which is why the title of Dave Bonta's poem catches the eye: it turns a complaint into a boast. Translation, we are usually told, is a kind of leakage, and meaning spills whenever it is poured from one language into another. Bonta's miniature takes that picture of spilling liquid, makes it literal, and then asks whether something might be gained after all.
The poem moves in two steps. First comes a single image in three lines: "a barrel full of stinking water / on a barge going / to a new ship." Then comes one line of statement: "I have translated my life in three lines." Only here does a speaker appear, and he arrives to tell us how to read what came before. The barrel is the life, and the three lines we have just read are the translation. It is a neat trick, because the poem proves its claim as it makes it. The reader can count the lines and check.
The word "translate" does more work than it first seems to. It traces back to a Latin word meaning "carried across," and carrying across is exactly what the barge is doing. The barrel is being translated in the oldest sense, ferried from one vessel to another. The image is not merely a metaphor for the process but the process in miniature. The phrase "a new ship" also implies an old one, so the life has already been somewhere. The poem catches it in the middle, on the humble go-between of a barge, neither where it began nor where it is headed.
The choice of cargo is the boldest decision. Bonta could have loaded the barrel with wine or oil, something that flatters the life inside it. He chose "stinking water." The sound of the phrase is harsh and clipped, the hard *st* and *nk* sitting in a line otherwise made of soft, rounded words like "barrel" and "water." That looks like self-deprecation, a life that smells bad. Yet nobody ferries rubbish to a new ship, and water is what a crew cannot do without. The poem holds two attitudes at once: the life is unpleasant, and it is worth saving. The gain of the title seems to live in that tension. Carrying the water across gives it a value it did not have standing still.
The form supports this quietly. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters in the opening three lines. The poem uses a single capital, the "I" of the last line, so the speaker steps out only at the end. The lines also shrink as they go, from nine syllables to five to four, as if the picture narrows toward the ship. The heavy first line, with its stresses falling on "barrel," "full," "stink-" and "wa-," gives the barrel real weight, and the lines about the barge and the ship are light by comparison. The break after "going" leaves the participle hanging. We must jump to the next line to learn the destination, just as the barrel must cross a gap to reach its ship. The *b* of "barrel" returns in "barge," and "ship" ends the image softly.
The last line is the longest, at ten syllables, and its long *i* sounds knit together "I," "my," "life" and "lines." The sound seems to insist that the speaker, his life and the form that holds it are one thing. The phrase "in three lines" is also a little ambiguous. It can mean "using three lines" or "inside three lines," so the poem becomes both a method and a container.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about cost. It leaves out almost everything, with no names, events or explanations, and offers one smell and one slow movement across water. But that selectiveness is what translation really is, and the poem suggests it can be a gain as well as a loss. A life that might have sprawled becomes an image the reader can hold. The reader also becomes a translator, turning the barrel back into a life. The poem has the compactness of a haiku without following its pattern, and it trusts that a small, strange picture can carry more than an explanation would.