translating understanding

1.
exactly how does one "experience" the worldview behind a particular language?  i do not know.  even though this i believe:  being able to understand another language, to speak it and/or write with it, is to be able to pass through a glass wall.  i think of this now because of where i am these days, speaking another tongue; because of the manuscripts that need to be read of the same language, but different because written and crafted; because i remember understanding a spoken another and being able to rudimentary speak it, too, even as being unable to read it.  and being able to read another language, and yet neither speak it nor understand it spoken.  what is the measure, then, of multilingualism?  and how true this experiencing of a particularity, a worldview, behind a language?

some time a long time ago, i understood and speak sign.  but when the hands-talking stopped, the understanding was lost.  the skill of trans-lation, gone.

Abad said the first language is feeling.  everything else used to convey it is translation.


2.
a brave young writer's collection reached me this afternoon.  i am asked to comment on it.  the works are burdened with the weight of its words.  the printed attempts to grasp Universe into one's left hand.  in her note, she said she meant to explore divinity and "sense and essentiality, existing and occuring (sic) within the utmost prosaic, but also poetic, function of language".  she called her collection "Quintessence".  i do not understand what she meant.  do not know what to say.  maybe.  to take life and language and poetry less seriously.  sometimes.  and maybe, too, that poetry may possibly be all about simply sensing the outside through looking in.