Below are the readings; all can be considered in some ways “translations” of the page, at least in the making use of the page as a locus for further activities/investigations in form (though, in fairness, many of the poets here would not consider their work this way–a la Tracie Morris, who takes her sound investigations to stand as-is as poetic forms). Tho, to use translation loosely for now, these are pieces where the page acts as both poetic object (poem) and score (not dissimilar from how we might think of poets theater too). If one thinks of translation as a form of active making (poesis) or embodied reading, then we are all, to a degree, translating when we read–and write–poetry. Here, investigations into particular elements of the poetic environment serve, one can argue, as instances of directed attention on part(s) of the active making/embodied reading process (each for very different authorial reasons). If we are interested in found poetry or writing in the service of reclamation of public space or poets theater as art form or… then we need focus on form and convention: what form will your work take? What are its intentions and how do these translate as “filters,” or “scores” for the active maker on other end (the reader)? As we head into the writing of our collaborative pieces and finish (by Saturday!) the individual project of making a poem that speaks directly to a local phenomenon that affects you deeply (that you have a stake in), then we need be quite attentive to form. If poetry is an enactment of language, then content IS form–and this we have yet to really think about systematically… So, enjoy (and pay attention to detail…)
Readings are in 2 parts: 1) text-sound-score, and 2) from page to movement/gesture. And though there are several (more than usual) links, all are quick, most are primary works (are not critical essay), and most are audio or video files, so the reading is actually substantially less “heavy” than in previous weeks. Come with questions and thoughts regarding problems, further experiments, etc.
Poets Theater Piece (excerpt):
The Nonsense Company, excerpt from “Great Hymn of Thanks Giving”
Sound File – http://princemyshkins.com/ncmusic/Hymnclip.mp3
Sound File – http://princemyshkins.com/noncomgreathymn.html
Synopsis & fragment of text from the score – http://princemyshkins.com/noncomgreathymn.html
SOUND & SCORE
Steve McCaffrey/bpNicol (The Four Horsemen) -
Tracie Morris on Sound Poetry
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Close-Lstening/Morris-Tracie_09_Discussion4_WPS1_NY_5-22-05.mp3
Tracie Morris – Great Aunt Meets a Bush Supporter
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris/Close-Lstening/Morris-Tracie_12_Petro_WPS1_NY_5-22-05.mp3
Chris Mann – PRESS UPPER RIGHT BUTTON, FAR RIGHT CORNER, THEN FEEL FREE TO PLAY
http://theuse.info/
Caroline Bergvall, About Face
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bergvall/Bergvall-Caroline-About-Face-2004.mp3
Some considerations about translation apropos to poetry’s investigations into sound, gesture, & context/environment, from Brandon Brown & Thom Donovon on the unique translational practices of Brown (from an article by Donovan on Brown & poet-translator David Larsen), at The Poetry Project:
Brandon BROWN:
I too want to thank Thom for his original considerations, and I take no issue at all with any of the readings made by Thom and David–in fact I am grateful for them. And I am also very grateful for David’s description of his own project, a work which I love and think constitutes an innovative and important text for contemporary assumptions about what “experimental poetry” looks like.
As one point of clarification, Latin is a language I read, having studied it for 12 years. For me, learning and studying other languages is integral to poetic practice–I think it can effect, like artworks, exciting aporias in the body’s experience of the empirical world. While I personally don’t buy notions of a “sacred” or “crystalline” text which calls out to be translated “faithfully” in its “afterlife,” I do acknowledge that there are all kinds of translation, all made of different intentions and uses. In fact, in my translation of Catullus #31, there’s the sentence: “It’s not like you can’t go read the corpus of Catullus in translations by Peter Whigham or Ryan Gallagher. Or Bernadette Mayer or Louis Zukofsky. And those translations are terrific.”
My project, and David’s work with ibn Khalawayh, have different approaches. You know how some poets hear poetry in the air? Well, I do too sometimes. But for the Catullus book, I want to try to present the totality of my encounter with the text as a reader, including the unpredictable movements of my body, including the political and somatic joys and horrors, while translating the text. I fail to see how translation can exclude reading from its action, and I fail to see how a hermeneutic gesture can be excluded from any act of reading. I just want to describe different regions of the action. And I’ll say it with Larsen: if it’s not your cup of tea, cool! It is interesting to note, however, and I do it with dismay as well as affirmation, that there seems to be a “threat” inherent to discussions of translation, and its questions tend to upset the hegemonic guardians of pure language. The (mostly male) aggression I witness in these comment boxes reveals this precisely, and it is a sparkling provocation to hope that poetics has the potential to effect other possible kinds of cognition and response.
***
Sadly, Sara Wintz and I hosted our last SEGUE event of the season this past Saturday. David Larsen and Samantha Giles (of Small Press Traffic in San Francisco) were the readers, and I thought an excellent complement to one another, Larsen reading from his translation of Ibn Khalawayh’s 9th century lexicographic text Names of the Lion, and Giles from a harrowing long poem regarding the torture and abuse of prisoners by the United States.
David Larsen has been doing some excellent translation work in relation to conceptual practices (and I address this below in my intro for Larsen’s reading last weekend). I want here to put his work in conversation with the Bay Area based poet-translatorBrandon Brown, who, like Larsen (as you’ll see below), has also been drawing generously upon proceduralism (constraint-based composition methods) to produce translations. In Brown’s translations of Catullus, for instance, the poet-translator provides his would be collaborators with instructions about how they may go about translating Catallus from Latin to English. To give you a taste of this, here are the instructions Brown gave to me last summer when he invited me to collaborate with him on his translation project:
“I thought we could collaborate on poem 87 in the corpus of Catullus. This is the Latin text:
Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam
vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea est.
Nulla fides ullo fuit umquam foedere tanta,
quanta in amore tuo ex parte reperta mea est.
My instructions for your translation are to, while translating the poem, do a Google search on ‘fedora’ and to consult p. 160 of Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin. Translate the poem into a prose paragraph.
(As I mentioned, please disregard these instructions in any way. Translate however you please. I will not alter the text you send me.)”
Brown’s translation practice falls in a tradition after Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, and others in the New American Poetry who liberally abandoned (a la Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”) the reproduction of meanings for a more literal or affective translation work. A translation practice, to use a trope from Benjamin’s essay, that wishes for unique languages to leave a mark upon one another, thus altering the destiny of both languages through their contact in a literary work.
Yet, Brown is doing more than just leaving a mark of one language upon the other though his translation work. His focus is on the translator herself—the body of the translator, the cultural prerogatives of the translator, the way that translation is to a high degree a personal and embodied practice. David Brazil, in the recent issue ofON Contemporary Practice, speaks to this idea where he quotes Brown:
“There’s The Persians by Aeschylus, a translation of The Persians, by Aeschylus, about which the writer has written that he ‘tried to include many collaborators to intervene in the translation, especially including Edward Said, Jane Austen, Walter Benjamin, my Arabic class, the Clash, e-mail correspondence with a translator recruiter from the U.S. Army, and Rumi; also all the things I ate and drank and wore and said and did are in the translation; and most especially I tried to pay attention to the terrific war and the terrific language that the war made that completely infiltrated all of my food and beverages and clothes and words and actions, and I let that get in the way of the translation too.’” (ON Contemporary Practice 2, p. 22)
And:
“Translation as I understand it involves a preceding writing, a proceeding writing — in between is the body that translates. The preceding writing is absorbed by the body of the translator in the act of reading. And when the translator writes something down which proceeds from the act of reading and the preceding writing, that is called ‘translation.’ However, far from idealizing a notion of repetition, this translation model wishes to privilege the delay between preceding and proceeding marks. To acknowledge the fact of detour. To suggest that things can go haywire.” (ibid, p. 22)
By bringing the body/person of the translator into play—the ad hominem translator if you will—Brown cites the translator as a vital relay in the process of bearing a literary work across into language’s many afterlives (to use another curious term from the Benjamin). What’s more, translation becomes an act of second reflection (Adorno); the translator attends to translation as a conceptual act both reflecting and permuting the original object/idea of the translated work. The translation does not describe the original work, so much as it reconceives it, injecting it with new ideas and values. I like the way Brown gets at this problem through his terms “proceed” and “precede”—as though his translation were always marking the fact that it is constituted by delay, and/or a sense of uncanniness that the translated object cannot be frozen because the translator’s life is involved with it, in fact may even depend on it.
Brown is part of a continuum of translation practices situated within an avant garde tradition. Yet, more importantly, his translation work partakes of a recent trend of poets and translators wanting to bring their embodiments to the foreground, and to mediate the process of translation/writing through socio-political responsibilities and inflections of community. As though, a la Fluxus or a live art tradition, to admit art’s embroilments in a life being lived in relation to others. Brown’s work moves at the pace of life, and among a community and nexus of friendship that he addresses partially by involving them collaboratively in the process of translation, but as much so by making them part of the content of the work.
———-
MOVEMENT/GESTURE & THE PAGE (in poetry)
Here is just a small sampling of things on movement & gesture to be listened to/read/looked at for tomorrow. Instead of choosing several different artists, I focus, besides the Beckett (top) on ONE artist, who works collaboratively, and whose transformations from page to gesture I think is exemplary of some of the paradoxes, problems, and trajectories we’ve discussed thus far – of how, when the page is felt to be somehow inadequate for a particular mode of creative writing, a certain poetical project, one might proceed to move beyond the physical page and into other media, sometimes entering the sphere of nearly complete gesture. I look at Toscano’s work, in part, as example (also) of this poet’s evolution over time (not that he doesn’t still write poems on the page, mind you!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u2DAp6fceQ&feature=related – Beckett, excerpt of Film
Rodrigo Toscano, Relay, poem (movement on page– example of earlier poetry)
http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/press/TOSCANO.pdf – Strikes & Orgies, from Wheelhouse Magazine PRESS Anthology 2009
Rodrigo Toscano, “to become super-solid” – translated interests, now from page to video poem, multi-media:
http://breachjournal.com/Bios/RtosSuperSolid.html
Rodrigo Toscano’s thematic interests in collaborative work, interruptive poetics, modulation of form indicative of intersecting, colliding socioeconomic classes, etnicities, languages, “translated” now from page to gestural parameters, (some lines remain, but the work here is now live, the delivery system is Toscano’s “Collapsible Poetics Theater,” with “entities” playing out “scripts” through large and small movements, where all “players” come together over a few days to work out the piece, in part, determined by the space in which the piece will be “performed” Collapsible Poetics Theater – Documentary Excerpts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5P61GkqKPU – rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7B8X2OWwHM – rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDZLV-XmRa8 – rehearsal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKgHrE7OaXY – performance excerpt, from PRESS Lit Conf. (Evergreen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7X4EEQc6SI – performance excerpt from PRESS Lit Conf. (Evergreen)
poem (score) for/from Collapsible Poetics Theater: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/toscano/toscano_Symposium(RodrigoToscano).pdf
(everyone say hi to Sophie)
——————————————————-
Optional
- “Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake” ( a longer audio file you can listen to ahead of time if you wish)
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/nova/Nova-Convention_12_cage.mp3
Christian Bok:
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/bok/Bok-Christian_Seahorses-and-Flying-Fish.mp3
Finally, heading from sound to sound + video, Linh Dinh, “Late Weather”
http://lowerhalf.blogspot.com/search?q=Late+Weather
And finally finally, heading from sound and video to Situationist-inspired “derive / automatic poetry…” from Sam Truitt, Vertical Elegies
http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/truitt_sam/Truitt-Sam_01_rock.avi