Tag: bill herbert

For the 48th Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, we took The Poettrio Experiment’s British poets, Sean O’Brien, Fiona Sampson, and Bill Herbert over to the Netherlands to carry out translation laboratories with Dutch poets Menno Wigman, Hélène Gelèns, and Elma van Haren and language advisors Karlein van den Beukel, Willem Groenewegen and Rosemary Mitchell-Schuitevoerder.

Over three days, the British and Dutch poets worked with language advisors in threes to translate the British poetry into Dutch. We filmed and recorded the trios working together, with researchers (Dr Jones, Dr Johnson and Dr Lobejón Santos) sitting in and observing how the trios worked to resolve ‘untranslatables’ and ambiguities, teased out the nuance in the British poems and interacted personally. 

After each day’s translating, we interviewed trio participants about their experience of that day’s trio – as the next day, they’d be working in a new trio. 

The trios produced a lot of exciting translations and we gathered a large amount of data about how the trio structure worked, as well as how the laboratory worked – remembering that people’s bodies were as important as their minds. Heat, hospital visits, appetites and seating positions all became factors in how trio participants felt that the translation process worked.

As part of the festival programme on Friday, the Dutch and British poets read a selection of their translated poetry, and one trio of Professor Fiona Sampson, Dr Karlien van den Beukel and Hélène Gelèns discussed the process of working together.

Principal Investigator Dr Francis R. Jones and Research Associates Dr Rebecca May Johnson and Dr Sergio Lobejón Santos discussed the trio laboratories with Jan Baeke on stage in front of an audience of festival attendees, commenting on the kind of quantitative and qualitative data we’ll be looking at for our analysis. 

See a link to our Poetry International Festival page here. Video of our presentation to follow.