Emoji in Translation: A Review of The Grey Bird

The Grey Bird, (Coconut Books, 2014), with emojis by Carina Finn and translations by Stephanie Berger, is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time. Here’s why:

1. Collaborative work is better reading than solo projects.

Sometimes when I read a book by a single author, I want to write in the margins and create another poem/work, offering editing suggestions, and/or just plain letting them know how much I loved a certain line. When you have more than one lens involved in a work, you can see more than a single consciousness’s approach, and it often seems “better” than what I would imagine would have been created on one’s own. If I had just seen Finn’s emojis or just read Berger’s text, I am not sure I would have been as entranced. It’s the combination that works and is brilliant.

Finn’s emojis on their own:

??????????????????

Berger’s text on its own:

Is that a poem or just a bunch of food?

2. Collaborative work is better writing than solo projects. 

Playwrights/screenwriters do it all the time. Why don’t poets do it just as often? I’ve been doing collaborations with totes brillz poets like Steffi Drewes and Amick Boone—at first it started off as just a way to write outside myself, but then it was about making art that I don’t think I could have otherwise been part of making. In The Grey Bird, what is written and not written between the text by Berger and the emojis by Finn is the space of collaborative excitement—a powerful (un)translatability of text and image (this isn’t from their book, but it features the poets doing what I’m talking about).

3. Emojis are the future.

Sometimes when I watch a silent film/listen to instruments/watch dance, I am aware of how useless words are on their own. Text does not have vocal inflection or suprasegmentals, facial expression, physical gestures–all of which aid communication. Emojis offer a visualization, a way of seeing that text can’t show.

4. Emojis are sexy.

Also possibly related to what I’m talking about in my unformed babblings: emoji use leads to more sex.

5. This (and more like it) and/or, why you should just buy/borrow/steal this book: 

An excerpt from “Death of the Grey Bird”:

Finn’s emojis:

?????

??, ?❤, &

??.???

?????.

?????!!

???.

?.

Berger’s text:

Massage my skull, stranger. 

I smell ok, your heart seems ok, &

mine is a two-piece. Swim

beyond this charming song.

Graduate already!!

Time is a gift. And it’s drunk. It

lets go of its balloon and 

goes home.