I: A reverse chronological timeline of emoji and other pictographic phenomena

2014—The Grey Bird, a chapbook of "thirteen emoji poems in translation," is published by Coconut Books

2013—I receive my first emoji in May, a test pictograph from a friend titled "Pile of Poo"

2010—iPhone, Gmail, and Android plugins enable the emoji keyboard

2010—The Unicode Consortium publishes an initial set of 722 emoji in The Unicode Standard 6.0, allowing for international compatibility

Mid-2000s—Japan's three main operators incorporate emoji to the delight of their users, who prefer emoji as a playful and negotiable alternative to the prospect of anxiety-provoking direct communication (a language softener, if you will)

1998—Industry pioneers DoCoMo manufacture the first pager with pictographs

1990s—Wal-Mart employs the smiley to advertise low prices

1970s—Philadelphia brothers Murray and Bernard Spain mass produce noveltyitems featuring the yellow smiley face (coffee mugs, bumper stickers, underwear, etc.)

1963—Harvey Ball, commercial artist, designs said smiley face to improve corporate morale at Hanover Insurance

3000 B.C.—Early Mesopotamians leave first evidence of cuneiform pictographs on clay tablets

II: The naturalist's guide to observing emoji

In Ezra Pound's "A Retrospect," the perfect symbol is defined as a natural object, one whose "symbolic function does not obtrude" (9). In the case of the natural object, readers "who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk," the poetic quality remains irreducible (9). Approaching Carina Finn's poetry, then, composed entirely of pictographic emoji symbols—natural, yes, albeit with an indubitable Japanese glint—is a paradoxical undertaking, to read personal symbolism and universal naturalism in simultaneity.
     While books like Emoji Dick (Moby Dick translated into emoji) and Xu Bing's Book From the Ground are graphic books of prose that utilize symbol to convey narrative, Finn is the poetic trailblazer in the literary landscape of emoji. Her poems adhere to poetic conventions from line break to repetition, even enjambment.

Repetition:

Enjambment:

     It is a language in which the contemporary reader is automatically literate even if he/she has never encountered the Unicode standard pictographs. It is from this base understanding that Finn constructs syntax that ranges from the hysterical (twenty-seven bombs and a cup of coffee) to the emotionally vulnerable (a blue heart, seven advancing clocks, and a gun). The vulnerability is inherent to the in situ form of the emoji, the cell phone. Finn cultivates her reader as a voyeur even if her reader is not accustomed to receiving such lush text messages.

III: A few comments on the necessary deviance with respect to emoji source-to-target text 

While some view the pictograph as an art form, most contemporary users of emoji would agree to call it a picture language. As such, The Grey Bird does not present as an ekphrastic work, but follows a staid convention of translated poetry (source-language text on the left, target-language text on the right), and it must be assumed that the intended relationship between Carina Finn (emoji poet) and Stephanie Berger (translator) is strictly that of poet and translator.
     Because every emoji character has been published in The Unicode Standard with a standardized titular phrase, anybody can easily attempt a translation (or at least a decoding) of Finn's work. The following excerpt from "Grey Birds on a Wire (Angst Attack)" shows the depths of Berger's subjectivity.

Source:

    

In situ target:

… I wrote it / on the high speed rail, only stopping once / to barbar my hair / like anygood American! I am a bolt fox, / a gift to the palette, / grey birds on a wire. True as roses. As the conch. / Let us / turn to the city in autumn & lust. / Inside of this treatise, we have dog-paddled deeper / than the underwater cameras and below our education. / We have celebrated terror, spun / a few shiny things around and called it love. / Angst attack! Angst attack! / Gimme six martinis stat & / frozen treats for days, I dunno.

     By constructing a variable syntax for emoji in which a pictograph can act as a modifier or predicate for the preceding word, not to mention the temporal abstruseness, it is clear that Berger is lyrically imbuing, associatively interpreting, and non-sequentially narrating Finn's emoji poems. It is a playful contamination of the source language with idiomatic spillover and cryptic winks at the ultimate lingua franca and its source user.
     Diction is variable too as repeat pictographs have multiple articulations. In the case of the figure of the titular grey bird (Unicoded simply as "bird"), Berger translates in seven distinct ways for its thirty-five manifestations, deciding on translations as disparate as grey bird (18), lady birds (2), sparrow (1), turtledove (4), dove (2), a purely associative nest (2), and the least traceable, angst attack! (6). While the dominant articulation of "grey bird" becomes an assimilative act, all other articulations are the consequence of schematic accommodation, Berger forging linguistic equilibrium as the context fluctuates. 
     Umberto Eco famously called translation the "art of failure" since it is impossible to reconcile the nuances between source and target languages. In The Grey Bird, Finn's source language (emoji) evokes a culture that is coextensive with the world—it is, in effect, a palette language created with the global market in mind—so the failure of translation should be even more a surety, not because of the relative talents of Berger as a translator, but the coextension of the language. Finn alone can judge if Berger is best conveying the impact of the original poetry. Regardless, it makes for a better translation than the simple decoding into The Unicode Standard.

Approximate standard target via The Unicode Standard:

… HIGH-SPEED TRAIN WITH BULLET NOSE HIGH-SPEED TRAIN WITH BULLET NOSE HIGH-SPEED TRAIN WITH BULLET NOSE HIGH-SPEED TRAIN WITH BULLET NOSE HIGH-SPEED TRAIN WITH BULLET NOSE / BARBER POLE FLAG FOR USA! HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN WOLF FACE. / ARTIST PALETTE ARTIST PALETTE ARTIST PALETTE ARTIST PALETTE ARTIST PALETTE WRAPPED PRESENT,  / BIRD BIRD BIRD. ROSE ROSE. SPIRAL SHELL. / NIGHT WITH STARS / NIGHT WITH STARS NIGHT WITH STARS NIGHT WITH STARS MAPLE LEAF & SMILING FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES. / MEMO OPEN BOOK SWIMMER MOVIE CAMERA GRADUATION CAP SCHOOL SATCHEL. / BALLOON GHOST PARTY POPPER OPTICAL DISC OPTICAL DISC OPTICAL DISC PURPLE HEART. / BIRD BIRD BIRD! BIRD BIRD BIRD! /COCKTAIL GLASS COCKTAIL GLASS COCKTAIL GLASS COCKTAIL GLASS /COCKTAIL GLASS COCKTAIL GLASS & / SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM / SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM SOFT ICE CREAM WHITE MEDIUM STAR CLOUD.

—Andie Francis, poet/emoji user

Notwithstanding the absent and/or implicit conjugations of this language, it is evident that Berger forgoes simple decodification, suggesting that in the case of emoji, translation is context-dependent, the prevailing context being some hybrid of American poetry and her friendship with Finn. In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams states, "crude symbolism is to associate emotions with natural phenomena such as anger with lightning [and] flowers with love" (188). Williams pledges "escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from 'reality'" (189).  The form of The Grey Bird exquisitely dramatizes Berger's decisions to reinforce or annihilate. In one particularly adherent translation of a title, Berger seems to be in step with Williams, mocking the strained associations.

Source:

In situ target: "Pierced like an olive in a dirty martini & A-OK (says the beer-drunk heart of a grey bird)"

Standard target: COCKTAIL GLASS OK HAND SIGN BIRD CLINKING BEER MUGS HEART WITH ARROW

     These literal approximations are likely ironic, and the comic effect is part of the synergy inherent to this collaboration. As I ponder my own translation, I cringe at the applied heuristics: "It's OK to Pregame with a Martini, or 'Cheers to the Grey Bird!' who's fallen in love."

IV: The dawn of emoji   

At its most ecstatic, The Grey Bird showcases its collaborators reveling in the elevation of emoji and luxuriating in the accommodations of poetry. At its most self-aware, The Grey Bird balks at its own artifice (Berger refuses to translate a virtual smörgåsbord of eighteen emoji foods, simply replying, "Is that a poem or just a bunch of food?"). At its most forlorn, The Grey Bird becomes pidgin, what Tom McArthur calls, "a marginal language which arises to fulfill certain restricted communicative functions among groups with no common language." Just as indirect nature creates a vacuum—animated clouds and flowers act as meager substitutes for the real thing—so too does emoji further expand the void initiated by text message and email, those silent services that communicate for us, replacing the frequencies of direct communication.   
     The Grey Bird is above all, though, an experimental book of poetry, and Finn/Berger allude to this tradition of experimentation via a nod at Ezra Pound, who was the first to embrace the pictograph as a poetic technique in The Cantos. "I have measured my life in the rims of our ruins...if you bomb me again please do so in spoons," Berger translates à la Prufrock.
     In June 2014, The Unicode Consortium added 250 new emoji to The Unicode Standard, and as the palette expands, it is certain that emoji poets like Finn and translators like Berger will be heralded as pioneers of a burgeoning emojipoiesis. [LL]

*

Works Cited

• Finn, Carina, The Grey Bird. Trans. Stephanie Berger. Coconut Books, 2014. Print.
• McArthur, Tom, "Pidgin." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 8 Aug. 2014. <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.
• Pound, Ezra, "A Retrospect." Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1954. 9. Print.
• Williams, William Carlos, Spring and All. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume 1: 1909-1939. Ed. Arthur Walton. Litz and Christopher John MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. 188-89. Print.