Alternating Currents

PoetTrio Commission by Martin Heslop

Composer Martin Heslop presents a new music and film work commissioned as a response to collaborative poetry translation from the Poettrio Experiment workshops. The voices and poems of Dutch and British poets (Sean O’Brien, Hélène Gelèns, Elma van Haren, W. N. Herbert, Fiona Sampson, Menno Wigman) are set to a new electronic composition. Imagined as an intercepted broadcast, and itself an act of interpretation, Alternating Currents explores the intersection of language, code and music.

Martin is a writer and composer who lives in Newcastle. He was composer and musical director of Bright Phoenix, a critically acclaimed play with songs especially produced for the newly rebuilt Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. He is a regular collaborator with the writers Jeff Young and Lizzie Nunnery, and wrote and performed the music for Lizzie’s play Narvik, which toured last year and is set to open in Norway in 2019.

He also works with poets such as Helen Tookey. He has been artist-in-residence at Metal, Liverpool, where he first experimented working with film, and has worked on many site-specific installations and performances. His latest composition is Horny Handed Tons of Soil, a performance collaboration written as a love letter to Toxteth in Liverpool and the work of Adrian Henri.

WHAT IS A POETTRIO?

A ‘Poettrio’ is collaborative process between:

a poet who has written a source text
a language advisor who is an expert in the source and target languages
a poet who writes in the target language.

In our research we are working with Dutch and English poets who have been widely published, and language advisors who are experienced translators.

The poets are not experts in each others’ languages, though, the impact of English as a global ‘lingua franca’ means that the Dutch poets have (at least) conversational English.

The trio work together (in person) to translate source poems, with language advisor facilitating communication between the poets and assisting with language comprehension and choices.

The trio draw on a printed ‘interlinear’ text which is a line-for-line literal translation (as far as that is possible), giving explanations of culture-specific content if necessary. The interlinears are produced in advance of the trio session by language advisors.

OUR RESEARCH

We filmed and recorded two weeks of trio translation workshops from English to Dutch (in Rotterdam) and Dutch to English (in Newcastle).

Using qualitative and quantitive methods we are investigating how trios translate in a workshop context, how the different roles function and how creative processes take place in trios.

We are aiming to build a rich ethnographic picture of how poet-advisor-poet workshops function.

We are also looking at how trios translate compared to solo poetry translators.

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