Jonathan Stalling’s YÍNGĒLÌSHI (Yingelishi) is a book of poetry that is read in two ways: in Chinese and in English. He offers a line of Chinese poetry, then translates in into English, He then rewrites the English line phonetically in Mandarin Chinese, so that the new line in Chinese has its own unique and coherent meaning, which is then translated back into English. The end result is a poem existing in multiple languages and in no language at all, with multiple meanings that can be read many ways.
[Image ID: A line that reads, “早上好” which is Simplified Chinese for “good morning.” Then a line of English text that reads, “good morning,” followed by a line of pinyin or possibly a different method of transliterated Chinese that reads, “gũ dé mào níng.” Then a line of Chinese characters which reads, “孤德貌宁,” phonically the same as the above pinyin, followed by a line of English text which is the translation of the above Chinese, reading, “Even alone, the moral one / appears peaceful.” End image ID.]
When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.
Jen Bervin, Nets, a semi-erasure poetry book where Bervin strips Shakespeare’s sonnets down to their nets,’ while still leaving them in tact.
Language is a Foreign Language / Experimental Translation as Device
Nancy Seidler, Hopscotch Translation, 2022.
A good, insightful text on translation and it's role, with well described and nice examples.
Language shapes the way we see. Experimental translation shapes the way we see language. The way we see language shapes the way we construct our selves, the landscapes we inhabit.
i's, land/guage/scape, no original, floating, self/other relation, textual instability, entanglement, Yoko Tawada, enstrangement, Wang Wei, Chantal Wright, Chika Sagawa, Eliot Weinberger, Ezra Pound, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Octavio Paz, Outranspo, Sawako Nakayasu, Viktor Shklovsky, Xiaolu Guo, Bakhtin
“Is this ich always the same? Can one always be the same?” Her (Yoko Tawada) questions about language have no resolution, “and that’s exciting”. These questions without answers, this paradoxical positioning between languages, is the enstrangement she lives in a multilingual subjecthood.
“Language,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes, “is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating in my very being” (15). The language that allows us to say “I, myself,” is entangled within these frameworks. As Yoko Tawada mused, “I” am not the same “I” in another language.
The Politics of Experimental Translation by Lily Robert-Foley
Abstract. In this article, I will attempt to sketch out a translation practice that runs counter to conventional ideas about translation, wh
"Situating norms is obviously a fluid and problematic, culturally specific activity. Examining what is opposed to these norms serves to accentuate this. ... Translation very often is inflected with political or ethical aims, a desire to right wrongs in the original or to intervene in the landscape of authority and canon formation."
"... experimental translation is any translation practice that opposes itself to translational norms."
"It poses a threat to the mainstream dogma of translation, in particular, the place of fidelity, equivalence, accuracy, transparency, smoothness, and legibility. [...] it defines itself in contrast, or in opposition, to other more frequent forms of translation. ... not solely for aesthetic reasons but for social and political reasons. ... supported by a belief that the structures of aesthetics and poetics are profoundly and radically political."
"the idea that translation is also radically political, never neutral, always inflected or even generated by the ideologies that frame it and give it its pulse."
"what separates this practice from other forms of experimental writing is the question of language, of the foreignness of languages, and the act of translating in its formal sense and amidst the chaos of its cultural negotiations."
"Tim Atkins’s ‘7 Translation Types’, as part of his unpublished PhD dissertation, which identifies seven discrete practices, including constraint, editing and domestication, misreading, allusive referential, derangement of the senses, intersemiotic, and hoax and parody."
"the question of fidelity is proportional to the text and most importantly, to the context of manipulation and power dynamics in which it is situated. [...] The implication here is that to translate faithfully, an author who does not have much visibility represents a homologous subverting of norms to a translation that, for example, shoots holes in a source text with a 12-gauge shotgun and translates the resulting text. ... And this is because of each practice’s relationship to the norm."
"translation always brings out dimensions of cultural context that might be otherwise invisible, reveals what might first appear as transcendent universals as situated specificities."
"norms do not represent the majority but are always determined by power and by the elite minority who wields it."
"that the notion of sense equivalence is deeply connected to a closed, un-situated relationship between two equal languages and can even be associated with culturally blind constructions of sense and sameness."
"Authorial intention then becomes an instrument of justice: respect for the original is connected to the desire to right a transnational wrong – specifically with regard to the ‘neocolony’."
"Luise von Flotow’s four strategies for feminist translation (supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and hijacking) (1991) are instructions for experimental translators seeking to align themselves with the feminist cause."
"Spivak has referred to her in her article on the politics of translation as ‘intimacy’ with the culture and language original, necessary for the carrying out of an honourable translation. ... a lack of intimacy with an original, specifically in the case of translating across unequal power divides, can lead to essentialisms that serve more to propagate colonial or misogynist ideologies than they do to enact justice."
"By deforming, mistranslating, or rendering unintelligible a white, male canonical text written in a hegemonic language in a power centre, many experimental translators have political aims of posing a threat to forces of oppression ... a faithful translation of a text written by a subaltern author in a non-hegemonic language or in a marginal situation seeks to do the same thing."
"For Spivak, although the original text is not transparent, the activity of translation is – and must be."
“...Unfortunately it is very hard to
run fast on a vase And yet also it is hard to be apprehended
by a running Greek Erection Warrior On a vase On Fine
Sculpture Needless to say if we wrote an Ode On A Grecian
Urn we'd not applaud it for Truth and Beauty”
from The Persians by Aeschylus by/translated by Brandon Brown
It would be easier to translate the text more or less directly line for line from Spanish to English, but this would be to transfer the text as if it were a dead specimen in a glass display case. ... The author’s voice, then, takes on the status of a character within the text, instead of hovering above it in a position of supposed authority. The utopic ideal of an originary, authentic, pre-translated version of the text goes out the window. ... It has become a truism that representation is power. As a way of influencing or questioning dominant representations, translation is also a way of doing political and cultural work; removing linguistic obstacles so as remove conventional power dynamics from the equation. http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2015/06/18/mexico-city-lit-on-radical-translation-part-ii/#more-6245
