Poetry. LOST ORIGINALS, the latest collection of poetry from writer, scholar, and critic David B. Goldstein, explores the potential of metaphoric translation.
Taking as his foundation the notion that every act of speaking is a translation from one sort of experience to another, Goldstein developed each part of LOST ORIGINALS as an act of metaphor and an act of translation, and vice versa.
While skirting a humorous line, Goldstein's innovative poetic 'experiments' ultimately comprise an elegiac collection for a series of "lost originals," a group of objects and experiences that can only be accessed through language. In this way, Goldstein's encounters with a menagerie of objects and sources--from porcelain figurines, maps, and soundscapes, to computer-generated email spam, How-To manuals, and journalism about sharks--yield a myriad of voices, giving metaphorical speech to the unspeaking or unspoken, and at the same time, uncovering a hidden and surprising beauty in language normally viewed as impenetrable or utilitarian.
"David B. Goldstein's LOST ORIGINALS thrusts me back to this ambivalent relationship with the objects that surround us, that exist without breathing yet still fog up the mirror. This collection animates artifacts into language, dissolving the boundary between invitation and threat: 'soon you too will be opened / by the unmouthed key of my voice.' LOST ORIGINALS will pluck the splinters from the palm of your voice. Let it." --Julia Cohen
"David Goldstein's explorations into the known and unknown worlds of our experience leads us through centuries of cultural accumulation in search of 'the authentic, the original.' These deeply intelligent poems are endlessly alive to the workings of thought and the refractions of language. In Goldstein's work, it is possible to believe th
