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.