Author: The Poettrio Experiment

An AHRC funded investigation into poetry translation trios led by Francis Jones, Bill Herbert and Fiona Sampson with Rebecca May Johnson & Sergio Lobejón Santos

Sergio Lobejón Santos X Fionnghuala Sweeney

Poet, translator and research associate on the Poettrio Experiment Sergio Lobejón Santos worked with Newcastle academic Fionnghuala Sweeney  to produce translations and versions of Sergio’s poetry.

Watch the performance 

Fionnghuala could not be present but sent in the following recordings of two translated ‘versions’ produced in response to Sergio’s poems.

Framed:

 

Swan Song:

FOTOGRAMAS

(Sergio Lobejón Santos)

Cuadros emborronados desfilan

sobre un muro de tela porosa.

Tratan de romper su estatismo

en un alud cromático de fotones.

 

Son sólo juegos de luces, lo sé,

pero aun así no dejo de pensar

que esos actores de la inacción,

esos parajes ya abandonados,

son tan míos como las puertas

de las que intento huir cada día.

 

Frames

(Translation by Fionnghuala Sweeney)

Blurred pictures parade

On a wall of porous fabric.

Static ceremony

In a chromatic avalanche of photons.

They are just games of shadow, I know,

But I still cannot stop thinking

That these artists of inaction,

Those places already abandoned,

Are as mine as the doors

Through which I try to flee every day.

 

Framed

(By Fionnghuala Sweeney)

 

Faint

pictures figure the wall

and yet,

in all the pageantry

of impervious text, breaking

faith

in lost logic;

in the fall of metaphor

imagine,

i

a game of light,

shadowed

in knowing mastery of the glance

at the site of inscription –

the door of escape

to shallow civility

all ready already for i

with my needle

to sew into ground

– a stitch in the ditch

where the bones and the stones once laid

side by aside, for

so much depends, doesn’t it,

now

that you have wandered

on the greyness of stones,

the certainty of lapse, the slight weight of memory, only

a gram or two,

or three – enough, at least, to frame

an ending that is mine

provisionally

to forgo

the absolute of your singularity,

effendi,

(a turco, for all i know, a dog),

further west than even suspicion would allow

chromatically curtailed

in the crook of an eye,

the turn of a tongue.

no blue here.

no easy cradling.

 

GRUTAS OCEÁNICAS

(Sergio Lobejón Santos)

Parado frente al mar,

afina sus ojos para observar

las fuerzas que dan forma

a esa masa furibunda

que no conoce a nadie.

 

Las olas saltan al compás de Selene,

poniendo fin abrupto a su camino

al romper contra la roca desnuda,

gramófonos de aguja caprichosa

que degustan melodías polvorientas.

 

 

Los promontorios se elevan orgullosos,

aun en su impotencia, como testigos mudos

que acusan con pruebas a las mareas

de incontables años de desgaste.

 

Pesqueros abandonados reclaman un puerto

en el que poder soltar su cargamento

de reproches y suspiros sin razón ni dueño,

de agravios que ya nadie recuerda si acaso serían suyos.

 

En la orilla, un canto rodado se separa

con violencia de una sombra diminuta,

deslizándose por la superficie

mientras busca un lugar

en el que recuperar

su momento

de inercia,

como si ignorase que el único camino posible

conduce a la fosa abisal, última parada a la desidia.

 

El océano no conoce a nadie.

Jamás hará distinciones

entre visitas primerizas,

viejos amigos que, en su fidelidad,

siempre terminan regresando

a su cadencia sincopada,

entre quienes están de paso

pero jamás volverán.

 

OCEAN CAVES

(Translation by Fionnghuala Sweeney)

Standing in front of the sea,

Sharpen your eyes to remark

The forces that reshape

That furious, unknowing mass.

 

The waves start to the compass of Selene,

Abruptly ending their path

In the break of bare rock,

As gramophone needles

taste dusty melodies.

 

The promontories rise proudly,

Even in their impotence, mute witnesses

To the tides accused

with the evidence of countless years of wear.

Abandoned fishermen claim a port

To release their cargo

of reproaches and sighs

without reason or title,

of grievances unremembered even in the heart.

 

On the shore, a stone skips

Along its tiny shadow,

Sliding across surface

looking for a place

In which to recover

Its moment

Of inertia,

As if to deny that the only possible path

Draws downwards, an idling last stop.

The ocean knows no one,

never making distinctions

Between first visits,

Old friends who, in their fidelity,

Always end up coming back

To its syncopated cadence,

Among those passing through,

never to return.

 

SWAN SONG (Fionnghuala Sweeney) 

Sea eyes

seek the splash of monsters, the furtive

power of ‘here be’

mapped in anticipation –

 

Beneath, Elatha, still playing

the line, til three turns down it comes to a stop

and a generation of flesh

breaks on barren rock

– in the spent fury of tide on feathers

a song worn mute through

years of wear,

as, in the dust of a note

the promontories rise, the cliff edge

sharpening to accusation

 

and the pride of countless years

waits again on time and tide-

 

In the face of this new quickening

 

fishermen claim a port,

forsaking that cargo

of reproach,

of grievance unremembered

400 years and its over

in a blink, in the sigh

 

of the shore, where, out of sight,

a grain of sand

sheds its shadow –

A break in time

sliding

in search of a surface

a surfeit in which to recover

its moment –

What do you want, sibyl?

Not what you think. Not at all.

Not that inertia, that paid for innocence

Is mise en abyme

the last stop –

intact

 

Comments on the collaborative process by Sergio Lobejón Santos:

These poems are taken from a collection of poetry and short stories written between 2010 and 2013. Each story is complemented by a poem exploring similar motifs. The two poems chosen for this presentation, “Frames” and “Ocean Caves” are part of a series linked thematically by the ideas of individual identity and loss. The translation was negotiated between the two collaborators, establishing an agreement in which the translator would have the freedom to insert her personality and style into the text. Rather than doing that purely via translation, two sets of texts emerged from that process. On the one hand, the translator rendered the two source poems into English, with feedback from the original author. On the other, she created new poems based on the source texts, turning some of the imagery and wordings in them into purely novel compositions reflecting her idiosyncratic style. Just like the original creation, both the translated texts and the new poems complement and expand each other to create a textual landscape in which the personalities of the two authors appear interweaved.

Comments on the collaborative process by Fionnguala Sweeney:

Sergio’s work has an intimacy of articulation that makes it a pleasure and a challenge to encounter. I am very grateful to him for his generosity in trusting me with his beautiful work. And in being willing to tolerate what will inevitably be an act of violence. This because the movement across languages is always a breach of some kind of contract, and any encounter is an act of intimacy and of course of interpretation.

The translation, the interpretation, is always provisional, dependent and unstable; while the original work is always itself, always prior, always the maker of meaning, always at the hub of every dialogue in what may in effect be an infinite number of poetic conversations.

We are presenting two of Sergio’s poems today, but I was lucky enough to be able to read and begin to translate many more, and to read some of the short stories they sit alongside. The scale of the body of work available inevitably, and rightly, inflects what will become of meaning in translation. It also provides a clue to the interior of the poem, or the intention of its writing: to the understanding of desire and the operations of metaphor.

These things are of course entirely untranslatable, and it is only in conversation with the poet that the structures of thought that sparked the words can sometimes come to light. In this regard, translation itself is always metonymic – partial, often half baked, and always in some way completely missing the point, because it produces its own metaphors and they resonate across the host language in uncontrolled and unanticipated ways. Translation is its own metonymy – it makes language subject to the desire of the translator, and this is irrespective of how close the translation cleaves to the original.

The first poem here, Fotogramas/Frames, I met, because it is so long since I have used Spanish as a language of intimacy, as a wall of words. Because of this, the objectness of the words was always present, and the act of translation, which revealed their subjective qualities, was a surprise.

The improvisation is an attempt to engage again with to qualities – the metaphor as it re-materializes in translation, and the object-ness of the words of the original as matter that is somehow irreducible. There is a stolen line from William Carlos Williams.

The second poem, Grutas oceánicas/Ocean Caves was, despite an apparently greater simplicity, more difficult to unpick. I made several mistranslations. It is still somehow impervious to assault in this English version.

The improvisation tries to tackle the problem of naming and the ways in which the poetic somehow takes shape mythically around the utterance of a name. How may myth and the nomenclature of myth be translated? The improvisation tries to think this through, by considering translation also as a mode of historicization, as marked by the inscription of meaning and the loss of some kind of symbolic integrity – in the translation, of course, not the original.

Denise Saul X Di Zhao

Poet Denise Saul and translator and writer Di Zhao collaborated between English, Mandarin and visual translations.

Watch Denise and Di present their work

~

Other Flowers

“If we wait in silence for a while, we should see the apples that you talked about,” I say to Eris. She nods. The afternoon does not arrive in the way that I hoped. She points at the tree. Yesterday, and this morning, she kept on repeating the same word but I did not understand why she would mention fruit when the tree was bare. I met Eris at a conversation group last week where she talked about apples. I sit with her on the lawn and watch wood pigeons. “I still can’t see them,” I tell her. I sip a cup of green tea. She talks about persistence, daisies and other flowers.

 

“如果我们安静地等一会儿，应该会看到你说的那些苹果。”我对厄里斯说。她点点头。然而那天下午和我期望的不一样。她指着树。昨天，今早，她一直重复着同一个词，但是我不明白为什么树还光秃秃的时候她就已经谈论起果实。我和厄里斯相识在上周的座谈小组，那时她谈到了苹果。我和她坐在草坪上看林鸽。“我还是看不到。”我对她说。我啜了口绿茶。她说起坚持，雏菊和其他的花。

 

                                  Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 22.34.47

 

SHOE POEM

Explanation of collaboration

Denise

Denise Saul is a writer, poet and visual artist. She is a PhD in creative writing researcher at University of Roehampton. Denise is currently poetry pamphlet selector for Poetry Book Society. She is the founder of Silent Room: A Journey of Language, a collaborative video poem project funded by the Arts Council. http://www.silent-room.co.uk 

For the first ‘translation as collaboration’ text, Di sent me her untitled poem and also her iconic translation of that poem.  The first poem written in Cantonese ‘mirrored’ its iconic translation, both written by Di. I felt that another translation of these texts ‘from text to text’ or ‘poem to poem’ would create further distance between myself and her poems. My decision to photograph an object, that is, a shoe, allowed me to create a closer relationship between a visual image and Di’s work.  

Di Zhao’s translation of my prose poem, Other Flowers was my first experience of collaborating with a translator. Our collaboration involved a lot of trust as I cannot read or speak Mandarin Chinese. I was interested in Di’s interpretation of my creative work. Her initial response was to create an iconic translation of Other Flowers, a prose poem written in response to my experience of my late mother’s speech disability, aphasia. The new shape of my poem translated by Di, captured the prominent theme of language breakdown as well as the restriction and also freedom of language between the carer and the individual who is cared for. 

I am the founder of Silent Room: A Journey of Language, a collaborative video poem project funded by the Arts Council. I work with filmmaker,  Helmie Stil and  individuals who have the speech disability, aphasia, to create video poems using prompts, writing and hand gestures. So, my creative approach to translation has changed a great deal during my collaboration with Di. For the ‘Translation As Collaboration’ project, using a photograph to translate’ a text or poem was a new experience. 

Di

其他的花（qí tā de huā）is a combination of visual art and poetry, translated from Denise Saul’s Other Flowers.

The original text was a prose poem, whose intention was ambiguous when the context was not given. I decided to literally translate it to preserve all the possible interpretations. Furthermore, since Denise is a visual artist, I chose to reshape the translation to form an image.

The most challenging part was the interpretation of the original text. Her intention was to respond to her late mother’s speech disability. However, I decided not to limit the possibility of other interpretations. It was a very beautiful poem, leaving room for imagination.

The productive part was the combination of visual art and poetry of course. The original text was not a concrete poem, so I chose the image that first popped up in my mind after reading this poem. It was also the most fun part reorganizing the Chinese characters, which was like building a Lego castle.

I had translated several English novels into Chinese, in collaboration with other Chinese translators, but this translation experience was brand new. It was more of a creation rather than rewriting, so I was able to fully express myself instead of hiding my existence.

 

 

 

 

Kate Sweeney X Christy Ducker

WATCH ‘Vaccine‘ 3min 49sec. UK. 2016 |  Directed and animated by Kate Sweeney | Poem by Christy Ducker | Spoken words from Dr Mohamed Osman | Soundtrack by Caroline Mary

‘Vaccine’ is a short film by Kate Sweeney, made in collaboration with poet Christy Ducker. ‘Vaccine’ was written as part of Christy Ducker’s residency at York University, working alongside scientists at The Centre for Chronic Diseases. ‘Vaccine’ explores the power of narrative and how the dialectical image works in a poem. The film begins with a recording of a conversation with Dr Mohamed Osman about his research and fieldwork in Sudan. His words are accompanied by free flowing animation. The film moves from this loose conversational style to draw on the imagery and the rhythm of the poem using stark black and white ink drawings.

The film-making process is one of translating the space between words and language into a visual representation or interpretation that allows the poem to breathe within the film. The poem itself is a distillation of language and imagery encountered by Ducker in the laboratories and in conversation with the scientists, whose research centres around the search for a vaccine against the leishmaniasis disease that ravages parts of Africa. Translational medicine is biomedical research translated into a syringe containing a vaccine – something that can be used. It is often referred to as a ‘bench-to-bedside’ approach.

Presentation: 

Kate Sweeney is a visual artist and video-maker using animation and drawing in her work. She has a collage-like approach to editing and making videos and tries to utilise video’s capacity to bring together various technical and creative mediums and approaches. She works collaboratively with poets, writers and musicians. Kate has screened and exhibited nationally and internationally including Sydney International Film Festival,  London Lesbian and Gay film festival, Zebra Film Festival in Berlin,  Manchester Animation Festival and The International Poetry Festival, London.

She is currently undertaking a funded PhD at Newcastle University. Kate teaches and facilitates art, film and animation in a variety of academic and education contexts.

Christy Ducker is a poet and tutor. Her first full-length collection, Skipper, was published in 2015, and includes work commended by the Forward Prize judges. Her pamphlet, Armour (2011) was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her commissions include residencies with Port of Tyne, English Heritage, and York University’s Centre for Immunology and Infection. Her most recent publication is Messenger (2017) and she is currently a research fellow at Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice.

John Challis X Mark Byers

This English-to-English translation collaboration between Mark Byers and John Challis examines the boundaries between critical and creative text, literary analysis and poetic practice. Mark’s short critical essay on Jo Shapcott’s ‘found’ poem ‘Electroplating the Baby’ provides the impetus for John’s poem ‘There may be thawing damage’. Echoing and reduplicating Shapcott’s own use of textual appropriation, the poem gathers and transforms language from Shapcott’s poem, Mark’s essay, and a third source: Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality. Closing the circle, Mark interprets John’s poem through an act of critical erasure, creating a new text from the original and foregrounding its crucial themes of evolving identity, physical transformation, and the passage of time. Together, the three works dramatize the instability of the literary text, its tendency to proliferate, reproduce, cannibalise, and translate.

Twitter: John Challis @Keyholesurgery Mark Byers: @byersmarkr

WATCH the reading

There may be thawing damage

 

Our inclination is to make do with imperfection.

This practice is derived from an article entitled

 

Several Types of Death. The rich alone are capable

of investing in the absurd and the impractical.

 

But we must be in no doubt of our direction.

Let us review the findings. Upon a patient’s death,

 

which we define as ‘clinical’, perforate the body

to assimilate the material. Enclose it in an envelope

 

of copper, bronze or nickel, of nitrogen or gold.

Dr Parkes defines the second type as ‘biological’.

 

If it is beyond us to resuscitate a subject,

he encourages experiment. This seems only logical:

 

our progress does not depend on any special

timetable. If practiced accurately, the patient’s blood

 

is substituted. The third and final type we fear

is sadly irreversible. We must work fast to prevent

 

the degeneration of the body’s cells. Such tragic

alterations temper a subject’s character. Or soul.

 

Although it is impossible to suspend the narrative

entirely, by storing the body at a very low temperature

 

deterioration is arrested. We grant ourselves

the chance to taste the wine of centuries unborn.

 

Unless instituted immediately, full recovery

of any mammal after complete freezing will continue

 

to be unattainable. But our insufficient processes

cannot stop our mettle. There is still much to achieve.

 

On ‘Electroplating the Baby’

 

‘Electroplating the Baby’ is the title poem of Shapcott’s first collection, published by Bloodaxe in 1988. Comprised of sixty unrhymed couplets, the poem offers a meticulously detailed description of modern mummification as practiced by one Variot, a French scientist whose proposals for electroplating the dead were widely reported in the 1890s. The language of the poem is derived (often verbatim, or nearly so) from an article entitled ‘How to Electro-Plate Your Baby’, published in the English magazine Science Siftings in April 1895.

            In the first lines of the poem, the speaker regrets that ‘in our time the art of embalming / has not made much advance’, at least compared to the ancient Egyptians and their ingenious ‘antiputrescible baths’. This leads to a pair of rhetorical questions: ‘are our processes so imperfect / as to dull our inclination? // Or do we relish the privacy of dust?’. At this point, Variot’s ‘way / to obtain indestructible mummies’ is introduced, with step by step instructions on setting the ‘body of a child’ into an electrically conductive frame, spraying the cadaver with a ‘nitrate of silver’, submerging the frame in an ‘electro-metallurgic bath’, separating the ‘silver salt’ from its oxide, and finally immersing the frame in copper sulphate. The result: a preserved and metallised body with a ‘coating of copper’. At the close of the poem, the speaker asks what the ‘future’ of such a process might be, finding it ‘infinitely probable // that metallised cadavers / will never figure // except in small numbers / for a long, long time to come’.

            The longest poem in Shapcott’s first collection, ‘Electroplating the Baby’ is distinctive of Shapcott’s early inclination towards bizarrerie and the surrealism of fact (including the facts of history and science). Rather than attributing metaphorical significance to Variot’s strange procedure, the poem gains traction from the glaring contradiction between the scientist’s rigorous methods and his absurd and impractical objectives. The rendering of the source text into orderly couplets (both open and closed) functions as a kind of formal reductio ad absurdum, underlining the irrational rationality of Variot’s grotesque experiments.

Shapcott’s debts to her source are such that ‘Electroplating the Baby’ constitutes a ‘found’ poem. However, Shapcott does make minor alterations to the original text. For instance, ‘In our time the art of embalming / has not made much advance’, appears in Science Siftings as ‘In our time, the art of embalming has not made much progress’ (8, emphasis mine). Similarly, Shapcott’s stanza, ‘are our processes so imperfect / as to dull our inclination?’, derives from a much more involved question in the source text: ‘Must we look to the imperfections of the processes for the little inclination that we seem to have for mummification or embalmment?’ (8). However, some stanzas are reproduced verbatim from the original prose, with the addition of a line break.

Shapcott’s alterations of the source text were made for several reasons. The substitution of ‘advance’ for ‘progress’ seems to have had a metrical motive: ‘has not made much advance’ makes a regular iambic trimeter line, even if the result is grammatically non-standard (unlike ‘progress’, ‘advance’ is a countable noun and should not, strictly speaking, take ‘much’). In other cases, Shapcott’s alterations temper the formal tone and address of the original fin de siècle text. For instance, the article’s arch (and conspicuously gendered) question, ‘Does he wish to know how Dr. Variot proceeds’ (8), becomes ‘Do you wish to know / how Dr Variot proceeds?’.

In an interview published in 1990, Shapcott noted that she encouraged her own workshop students to experiment with ostensibly non-poetic diction, including the ‘“language of expertise”’ (29). However, ‘Electroplating the Baby’ does more than draw upon specialist vocabularies, contributing to a genre of found poetry which has its roots in the early twentieth- century avant-garde, particularly the ‘readymade’ practices of dada. Shapcott’s poem is suggestive of the belated assimilation of experimental practices into more popular poetic production.

The poet sent her own copy of Science Siftings to Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley and the article’s illustration was used for the cover of the book. A photocopy of the article is preserved in the Bloodaxe Archive with correspondence between poet and editor. Corrected page proofs also show that Shapcott wanted to avoid the two-line stanzas being divided by page breaks.

Shapcott’s second collection, Phrase Book, was published by Oxford University Press in 1992. Her essays on American poet Elizabeth Bishop, co-edited with Linda Anderson, were published by Bloodaxe as Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery in 2002.

Further reading

‘How to Electro-Plate Your Baby’, Science Siftings (20 April 1895), 8−9.

Kay Parris and Jo Shapcott, ‘Language, Truth and Sheep’, Writers’ Monthly (August 1990), 28−9.

Mark Byers

Fear works the body_s cells

 

 

Clare Archibald X Delaina Haslam X Line Toftsø

Underflow was a performance by Scottish writer Clare Archibald, translator and writer Delaina Haslam, and Danish artist and writer Line Toftsø. Underflow is a tri lingual text & audio-visual exploration of the linguistic spaces left by the loss of babies. It looks at the tongue that cannot be universally translated.

The trio met on Twitter and conducted much of their work via direct messaging on Twitter. They had never met in person until the event on July 20th 2017, with the exception of Line, who was not in the UK. Find them on Twitter here: Clare @archieislander Delaina @delainahaslam Line @linetofts 

WATCH the performance:

Clare Archibald 

Click here to hear Traduccion De Mi Mente, Clare’s Spanish-English piece.

Delaina Haslam

Ask me about my baby

1.

Doorbell.

A midwife.

‘It’s a bad time. It’s the funeral today.’

I don’t know if this woman – it’s a different one each time – knows of my circumstances. They’ve come every few days; they phone me when they discover I’m not in. But I’m not a new mother at home with my baby. I’ve been out visiting funeral directors and cemeteries.

2.

‘Do you feel you’ve had enough opportunities to talk to about what happened?’

‘No, not really … Our friends … they were amazing, um, over the period … But now, I don’t think they know if we want to talk about it.’

‘They perhaps don’t want to upset you.’

‘No.’

‘You seem, if you don’t mind me saying, more upset this week. I wondered if that might happen. It’s perfectly natural, and normal, really … Last week, well … I was quite surprised to see you arrive on a bike, to be honest.’

3.

‘So there’ve been two miscarriages, is that right?’

‘And an extremely premature birth …’

‘Ok, so how many children do you have now?’

‘None. He died.’

‘Oh that’s awful!’

[I thought you said you’d looked at my history.]

4.

The woman from Transport for London is sitting across from me. I’ve given her a cup of tea. I should be working but I’m answering survey questions about how I get around the city.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘No.’ [He died.]

[Ask me more. I want you to ask me more.]

‘So just you and your partner live here?’

‘Yes.’

I long to tell strangers my story. But no more questions come.

Line Toftsø Nyholm 

Lingua Pontem

lingua pontem

Explanation of collaboration

Clare Archibald
I asked Delaina to respond to my initial piece and then sent both pieces to Line.  Initially I had asked Line to respond visually but she asked if I wanted text as well which I hadn’t thought about, this was then left up to her & she added some text which I think enhances the whole piece & process. In terms of my piece I’d been looking to write a section of my book about being on holiday in Spain immediately before the planned birth of a baby that I knew would die. Although I spoke Spanish it was very rusty & I thought a lot about not having the words to explain easily in any language. Being able to do the piece in a kind of free dialogue with other people whose outcomes were unknown was really liberating & interesting. Writing the piece I had to translate ideas linguistically which was an interesting process & was really insightful in terms of thinking about acts of translation & linguistic spaces. Initially Delaina was unsure how she could respond to it, I suggested a list but the process was really open to us all individually & she went with what worked. I’ve since expanded the piece to include other unspoken elements (not in original due to timing restraints). We gave each other feedback on pieces but essentially decisions were left with the individuals. 

We collaborated solely by Twitter DM and email (none of us know each other or have spoken outside of online interaction). There were no real challenges and it was a pretty straightforward,  very positive process. 

I have no previous experience in this area other than I write a lot in response to visual prompts (taken generally by me but also via projects such as Visual Verse & Spontaneity Art)
Delaina Haslam
‘Ask me about my baby’ translates ‘Traduccion de mi mente’ into an alternative experience of baby loss. In the first part of our collaboration, Clare’s audio text searches for language to express a wish not to be asked questions. My response comprises four vignettes depicting the absence of a baby and how this absence influences dialogue with strangers. The experience of a presence and a wish not to be asked questions is translated into the experience of an absence and the desire to be asked questions.
Our collaboration is perhaps remarkable in that I have never met Clare or Line. Clare and I were put in touch by a mutual friend who knew we were both writing about baby loss, and who also told us about the Poettrio call for submissions. The inspiration for our collaboration came relatively easily. Clare was inspired by her experience of needing to learn Spanish to deal with a traumatic situation. For me, this quickly translated into my most difficult experience: finding the language to express something no longer visible. Clare suggested a list of questions that often get asked and their imagined, desired answers alongside the real answers: ‘Do you have children?’; ‘Yes, one but he died’; ‘No.’ But I was cautious not to appear to blame anyone for any questions that I may have been. Instead, I chose snippets of scenes which suggest the pain and loss. I’m used to writing longer prose texts, and Clare was instrumental in helping me cut this down to the bare minimum for the impact of suggestion.
I am a translator and a writer, and this collaboration combined these two functions. I most often translate sociological texts from French. Creating ‘Underflow’ was closer to my experience of writing experimental memoir and poetry than it was to my experience as a translator.

Bios

Clare Archibald is a Scottish writer interested in the interplay of forms and the potential of collaboration. She has previously been chosen to read at Storyshop at Edinburgh International Book Festival, was longlisted in the 2016 Lifted Brow/RMIT international prize for experimental nonfiction and is currently completing her work of experimental narrative nonfiction The Absolution of Shyness.

Delaina Haslam is a translator and writer. She translates from French and Spanish to English in the field of sociology. Before going into translation she worked as a journalist and editor for publications in Madrid and London including le cool. She’s writing her first novel about the experience of a mother’s grief after the death of her baby in 2014. 

Line Toftsø (born1969) Danish artist and writer. Published ‘Jeg bevæger kun øjnene’ (poetry) in 2015. First solo exhibition in 1992 in Copenhagen. Lives & works in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

Linda France X Matilda Bevan

Poet Linda France and artist Matilda Bevan have been collaborating on translations of the National Trust site Allen Banks in Northumberland, arising out of Linda’s current PhD research on facets of Victorian women’s visibility in relation to the Northumbrian landscape.

Watch Linda and Matilda present their work:

Allen Banks : Linda France & Matilda Bevan

Lapidary MB

Lapidary

We have no centre.                         We are the centre

from which all earth radiates                         mirrors tucked

in our crevices                        the forgottenness of things.

We break open                        near, far            crow bone

ash                        carapace of the soul. There

is nowhere to go.                         How should we ask

permission to enter                         our own home?

Made from mud                         lichen, dust

a woman’s touch                        housewifely we wipe

away            begin again.                         From before

history happened                        our hands reach out.

Here we are                         a constant recurrence

strata            mauve, ochre                        given to endure.

 

Matilda Bevan

Explanation of process

Working collaboratively is an important part of Linda’s practice as a poet so when she started visiting Allen Banks as part of her PhD research, it seemed natural to invite a visual artist to the site and encourage the possibility of a response. Also particularly appropriate as one of the themes of her sequence-in-progress is multiplicity and solidarity, similarity and difference.

Matilda made a painting in gouache and graphite, working from her own photograph taken at Allen Banks, keen to capture a sense of the ‘rock face’, a symbolic portrait of Susan Davidson, the shadowy Victorian widow who designed many of Allen Banks’ landscape features – summerhouses, paths, steps, bridges, a tarn sheltered by trees. Matilda emailed a photograph of her image to Linda, who initially worked from a print of it to create a preparatory draft of a poem – more about the process than the image itself. On visiting Matilda’s studio and seeing the original, this became something else entirely, speaking more directly to the image, although informed by the earlier version. One constant was the way the form leant into the natural structure of the rock face and borrowed its sense of line and brokenness.

Sometime afterwards Linda and Matilda decided to continue the translation process by flipping it around and seeing what would happen if Matilda made a visual response to a section of text from Linda’s unfolding poem sequence.   She chose a few lines from a longer piece and drew a self-portrait in graphite, overlaying it with rough strokes of white acrylic, giving a weathering and distancing effect.

The circle was completed – what wanted to be a face at the beginning found its rightful form in the mirror. A metaphor for the process of translation perhaps, involving reflection and symmetry, the fulcrum of clear seeing. The exchange was fluid and organic, rooted in a shared appreciation of a particular place. It also led somewhere new, following unexpected tracks of enquiry, altered perspectives.

Linda and Matilda have collaborated previously on a text and image ‘apple renga’ for Transition Tynedale/Northern Poetry Library (2015). The renga poem on the page was readable under a line drawing of a laden apple-bough, all framed by a boundary of apple names and contributor names. The Allen Banks work is part of an ongoing conversation.

Gabriela Saldanha X Heather Connelly

Escurrir is a collaborative script performed by Heather Connelly and translator and academic Gabriela Saldanha. Escurrir, can be translated as ‘drain, wring, slip away’ it is a playful work that exposes translation as a generative and performative act.

WATCH the performance:

The work is based upon the translation of the Riordan and Takayanagi’s (1896:v) metaphoric description of the difficulty of translating Japanese literature, ‘whose peculiar beauties are apt to disappear like the opal tints of a squeezed jellyfish’, (Henitiuk in St Andre 2014:144). Saldanha translated the English term, Jelly Fish, into Spanish and then back into English, which became [agua viva] ‘Live Water’ or [Medusa] ‘ Medusa’. We worked together discussing the merits of these subsequent metaphors and continued to expand the associations that they produced through the iterative translation and back-translation forming an elliptical ‘feedback loop’, that exploits the generative nature of translation and how the concept becomes expanded as it passes between languages.

The process: The work has been designed to evolve through constant editing and reworking and expand as each term is translated, back translated, and discussed as we consider what these ‘new’ terms tell us about the process of translation. Following on from experiments made during her residency at the Summerlodge (Nottingham Trent University , Connelly is  seeking ways to engage with the materiality of this process, to record and expose what is/has taken place, and how new articulations for translation are conjured up through these subtle shifts of vocabulary. She has begun to explore the potential of the physical artefact in documenting and baring witness to this ongoing practice and evolving process.

Escurrir | Abstract

Artist/researcher, Heather Connelly, and Translation Studies academic, Gabriela Saldanha, will perform a script in Spanish and English that explores the unstable and shifting subject positions of the translator and the translated. The two protagonists problematise the process of speaking for another and through another, performatively exposing translation as a multiple, provisional and embodied phenomenon. Theoretically the dialogue concerns the potential of two conceptual mappings to account for the translator’s subjective and embodied response: translation as restored behaviour (Schechner 1885) and translation as linguistic hospitality (Ricoeur 2006).

The text has been developed collaboratively as part of an informal research project between Connelly and Saldanha to expand their personal research into the performativity of translation within their respective fields (art and translation) and to test out what new knowledge can emerge out of this transdisciplinary practice-based research, which pays equal attention to process of writing and the sensorial activity of performing and enunciating the words. The text evolves with each iteration, taking different forms dependent upon the context within which it is presented, and often includes other participants.

Connelly seeks to engage academics in artist-led research, demonstrating the benefits of transdisciplinarity in examining a topic from multiple perspectives through a dialogic engagement with theoretical and tacit knowledge. Whereas Saldanha’s interest in translation stylistics has led her to argue that the anthropological understanding of performance as restored behaviour allows us to map literary translation as performance in a way that is closely in line with how translators tend to see their own practice.

The images that played while Heather and Gabriela performed.

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Jessica Sequeira X Jessica Rainey

Jessica Sequeira and Jessica Rainey both translate from Spanish to English. Their collaboration responds to the work of young Chilean poets and includes audio-visuals, translations and documentary poems sourced from Chilean news reports. 

At the presentation (at which Jessica Sequeira could not be present, as she was in Chile) a video that she made with Jessica Rainey was screened while Jessica Rainey read over it. 

WATCH HERE: 

Read the text and watch the video piece below:

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Part 3: process and presentation

Jessica Sequeira

I collaborated with Jessica Rainey, another translator from Spanish to English. For the Poettrio Experiment, we wanted to focus on Latin American poetry that included but was not limited to “straight” translations of the text from one language to another. Over email we threw around ideas about how we might incorporate video and documentary poetry. As I happen to be in Santiago de Chile at the moment, we also thought this would be a great opportunity to incorporate some work by contemporary poets, more or less young (under 40). With four poets who work at the Fundación Neruda in Chile, I recorded a video that combines abstract images, the poets’ readings of their work in Spanish, and my English language translations of the texts. This came to just under five minutes. The poets were very enthusiastic about getting involved, as well as about seeing their work translated, having it presented abroad, and opening it up to further avantgarde or creative possibilities; they were also very curious about Newcastle and its literary and translation scene! Jessica then had the great idea of producing “found poem” responses to the original poems and translations, incorporating documentary material from Chile. She wrote several docu-poems which are timed to be read during the live performance, during gaps in the video between poems and translations. This has been a wonderful process, which involved chance (my pairing with another Jessica working SP > EN; my presence in Santiago for a poetry festival at La Chascona), “standard” translation (the rendering of four poets’ work into English), collaboration (the use of documentary material inspired by Jessica’s background, which I would never have thought to add myself) and modernist techniques (the incorporation of cut-up texts using non-fiction materials). The title of our project, “The difficult art of living in Santiago de Chile”, is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it was thought up in collaboration with the four Santiago poets, who all write urban literature that very much reflects their interests and concerns as poets in the capital.

Jessica Rainey

The fact that Jessica Sequeira was in Chile working with poets was too good an opportunity to miss and became the obvious starting point for our collaboration. We agreed that the Poettrio Experiment was a chance to experiment with translation processes or presentation options that we might not otherwise have the opportunity to explore, and early on decided that it would be great to introduce a multi-media aspect to the presentation as a way to ensure the (otherwise physically absent) presence of the majority of the participants. Beyond that, the collaboration became quite an organic process, and effectively fell into two parts. In Chile, Jessica S. worked with the source poets, adeptly selecting, translating, recording and producing an audio-visual film. Meanwhile, I considered options for introducing documentary elements into the project – background information, news clips or article extracts – though it was not until I received the texts and video that my possible contribution became clearer. I decided to select key words, images or concepts from each individual poem and run an online search for relevant reports from Chilean media sources or organisations. Rather than translate these sources wholesale, I used the reports to create ‘found’ or ‘documentary’ poem-translations to give a flavour of Chile as portrayed by its media, yet accessed and processed by an outsider who had never visited the country. Although sentences or phrases do not necessarily appear in consecutive order, the translation of each unit can be described as faithful, with the exception of the fourth poem where some words or phrases were intentionally omitted. Wilful mistranslation or misrepresentation of facts, however, was never an aim of this stage. Rather, the aim was to support the original poems in concept and tone while providing an objective counterpoint to the lyric and translated poems. Among the initial ideas for incorporating the found poems was to include subtitles on the video; however, as the video was complete and neither of us were sufficiently techie to easily introduce them, the only other possibility seemed to be a live reading alongside the video projection. The reading of the found poems at times overlaps the source poems, at times the translations, in what is an imperfect but hopefully interesting polyphonic experiment. In keeping with the idea of translation trios and poetry experiments, then, we have somewhat inadvertently produced a three-tiered project (source poems, translated poems plus additional translation layer) that began in Chile with a live collaboration between poets and an initial translator, and ends in Newcastle with a live performance involving a second translator and finished film.

Martin Heslop X Helen Tookey

Composer and writer Martin Heslop and poet Helen Tookey collaborated to produce highly effective sound pieces, where sound and word were constantly re-translated across media.
They presented ‘Jitties’ at the event on the 20th July.

WATCH a film of Martin and Helen’s presentation

 
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Listen to the collaborative piece “Jitties” here: 

Jitties

aren’t on the map but you’ve always known them the dogleg through to the playschool the library the cuts through estates the tunnels that bring you out differently you have always wanted this to move unseen to cut passages able to slip through the cracks like the streams along the field edge the housebacks the narrowways the creosote fences overhangs of trees the gardens’ wild endings not overlooked not comprehended another life under this one humming with motorway a kind of code you slip away you’ve always known it danger under culverts circling spikes to stop you crossing by the pipeline watercourses older ways the body can read can know their presence motorway humming with escapes not speaking turning inwards creosote wood hot slabs tiny observation posts world expands to fill the space allowable constraint produces meaning under pressure it codes heightens you are aware the wires the tracks humming for miles concentrated here where you must be not speaking but knowing everything is there in the spaces between

Read their account of the collaborative translation process they forged:

Helen

The process began with conversations between Martin and me about what I had wanted the poems to convey or how I had wanted them to work as poems, and what he envisaged being able to do with them as sound pieces. Martin recorded me reading the poems, then he took the sound files away to work with and I waited to see what he would come up with. It was exciting for me precisely because he was creating new objects from the poems in a way that I couldn’t do myself. Many of the poems use fragmentation to try to convey a particular experience; in ‘Jitties’ I wanted to convey a sense of the language sliding, piling up, and in ‘Beautiful Error’ a sense of a mind going over and over a question, trying it out in lots of different ways. But I could only do that to some extent, because the text (printed or read) is fixed in one layout, one order. What I really love about the collaboration with Martin is that he’s been able to bring what I imagined into being through recorded sound far more than I could do it on the printed page – cutting up the vocal track, layering it over itself, so that you really get the sense I wanted of a kind of urgency and slipperiness. And the sound also enables the build-up of a mood, a texture – of eeriness, say, in ‘Beautiful Error’ – far more effectively than just the printed words could. So what I have found really exciting about this process is that on the one hand I’m giving the text, the poem, to Martin with a completely free hand – I want it to be entirely up to him what he makes from it, so that it comes back to me, as it were, as a new object; but on the other hand, with these poems that has actually resulted in a more complete realisation of what I wanted the poems to be able to do, because sound recording adds so many possibilities, particularly that of being able to make the language move and track over itself in ways that a fixed text can’t.

Martin

These particular poems of Helen’s, as opposed to some of our other work, were presented to me as finished pieces, and so in order to make something new I immediately decided that I was going to cut and splice the words, to repeat them, layer them, reverse them. Helen very kindly gave me free rein in this. The recordings of the text already had an immediacy and pace to them and I wanted to encourage that. I began by noting down sounds from the real everyday world that the poems reminded me of, then started exaggerating them or bastardising them until they sounded like something completely different. Sometimes these sounds that I’m looking for are in an instrument or a synthesiser, but equally can be found in the noises of a building site or in a long breath or in the clatter of metal. I go around hitting things, pressing buttons, listening until I find the right sound or mood.

It’s always a strange process, translating poetry which is able to describe all the senses, into a recording that is only experienced by the ears, and the challenge, as always, was to find the right tone; to work with the words but not be prescriptive or predictable; to find the right pacing and in some cases rhythm, and particularly in this case as these are short pieces, to set the mood quickly. There are also the odd times when I feel the need to disrupt the words, to impose on them, and the key is to know when to do this, and with Helen’s delicate yet precise writing I have to be careful. A lot of my music is written in collaboration with poets, playwrights and visual artists, and the style and tone of each project is different, but the joy of working with Helen is the care in which each word is placed on the page, their flow, but also how often the poems end up in unexpected places, and consequently this gives me plenty of room to experiment with sounds.

I recently read a book called Animalinside by the wonderful Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai with drawings by Max Neumann, and reading about their process afterwards was particularly interesting. The writer first responded to one of Neumann’s images and then Neumann, inspired by the words, made a further set of images, to which Krasznahorkai then responded by writing more texts. This back and forth, this cross-pollination of ideas and art-forms is exciting, and the projects myself and Helen are planning and developing are moving towards this way of working.

Bios: 
Helen Tookey is a poet based in Liverpool, where she teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her debut collection Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2014) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize. Her pamphlet In the Glasshouse was published by HappenStance Press in 2016, and the CD/booklet If You Put Out Your Hand, a collaboration with musician Sharron Kraus, came out from Wounded Wolf Press also in 2016.
 
Martin Heslop is a composer, writer and sound artist based in Newcastle. He has written musical scores and lyrics for short and full-length theatre shows and film, and has worked on many collaborations with poets, playwrights and visual artists for live performances, recordings and installations. He is currently studying for an MA in creative writing at Newcastle University.

 

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