In this two-session workshop, we invite poets, translators, visual artists, and curious makers of all levels to work in pairs, treating translation as a condition two people enter together—provisional, intimate, and sometimes deliberately led astray. Experimenting with translation approaches, making poems, images, scores and hybrid work, we will build on a small ecology of exchanged sounds, images, languages, errors, and illuminations, that belong fully to neither collaborator.
Our laboratory will be the award-winning, multilingual anthology “The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra.” Rather than reading its translations as finished products, we will enter its creative relationships from the inside: following the threads between Cecilia Vicuña and Rosa Alcalá; the shifting ground of language between Kazim Ali and Ananda Devi; the movement between Etel Adnan and Sarah Riggs’s languages and worlds; Amanda Lee Koe’s encounter with Yu Xiuhua; Valzhyna Mort and Polina Barskova’s passionate grapplings with history and the sayable; and Kit Warren’s images, which seem to write in a script no language entirely claims. Drawing alongside these artists on Édouard Glissant’s errancy, Pierre Joris’s nomadic poetics, and the idea of translation as a reciprocity of care, we ask whether translation could become a model for creative partnership—and perhaps for how we meet what is foreign to us without “mastering,” assimilating, or making it our own?
We welcome poets, translators, and visual artists of all experiences to join us, and to reimagine translation otherwise.