(Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Lara Glenum, Gabriela Jauregui, Mira Rosenthal) We will consider the ways in which translation is a collaborative practice, both between the author (living or deceased) and translator and also among co-translators. We will also consider how collaborative work often involves acts of translation. Is collaboration always already translational? Is translation always necessarily collaborative? The panelists work both as translators and poets. They have collaborated variously with one another and will discuss intersections among these projects.

Published Date: September 14, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Denver on April 9th, 2010. The recording features Amaranth Borsuk, Mira Rosenthal, Lara Glenum, Gabriela Jauregui, and Kate Durbin. Now you'll hear Amaranth Borsuk provide introductions.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Good afternoon. Welcome to Collaboration as Translation, Translation as Collaboration. Thank you for being here. We hope that we're going to be showing you some interesting work today that presses on the boundaries between these two terms. My name is Amaranth Borsuk. I'm the panel organizer. And the people on this panel were brought together by various friendships and confluences, which I think speaks to the notion of collaboration and how that is happening in poetry today. So I'm going to give brief introductions of each of the presenters, and we have two teams that are presenting together. Gabriela Jauregui and I will present together, and then Kate Durbin and I. But so I'll give author bios between the presenters. They'll each give a little bit of a craft talk about their work, show some work, and then at the end we'll have some time for Q and A about it.

Our first presenter is Mira Rosenthal. She's the translator of The Forgotten Keys by Polish poet Tomasz Ró?ycki. And she's the founding editor of Lyric Poetry Review. She's received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN America Center and the Fulbright Commission, as well as fellowships for the McDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Banff Centre, and elsewhere. Her own poetry has appeared widely in journals including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Slate, West Branch, and Notre Dame Review. One of Ró?ycki's poems and Mira's commentary on it also just received 3 Quarks Daily Top Quark Award and was judged by Robert Pinsky so that's wonderful news. And Mira has an MFA from the University of Houston, and she's currently completing her PhD in comparative literature at Indiana University. Please welcome Mira Rosenthal.

Mira Rosenthal:

Thank you, Amaranth. It's a lot of fun to be here on a panel of people who have been brought together from various realms, and also to be on a panel, where I feel like each of our projects is very different. But I think that all of them will point to the fact that translation in its various forms is always an interpretive endeavor. In other words, I do not believe that there is any idea, there's no such thing as a literal translation so I'll put that out there at the beginning. I want to go ahead and just give you a brief introduction to my work as a translator and then just touch on a couple points of how I see it as a collaborative practice.

My aim in talking about this is to answer one of the questions that we've put before ourselves as a panel. And that question is, is translation always necessarily collaborative? And my answer will be yes.

But before I get into my reasoning with that, I'd like to start by way of introduction, paraphrasing something that the wonderful translator of Russian poetry and literature Daniel Weissbort had to say about the translator's role today. "The more flexible attitude to language at this time," Weissbort points out, "has led to translators being more self-aware and distinguishing between different methods. The translator today often finds him or herself to be at once, reader, writer, and critic. And as such, seeks to systematize flexibility and mirror the creative process itself." And I'd like to just emphasize or underscore the idea that the translator is necessarily at once, reader, writer, and critic.

So following this idea, let me start by just telling you briefly about my background as a translator, which begins as my experiences as a reader and a writer. I didn't set out to become a translator, and I don't see myself as having any inherent linguistic ability with languages. And I certainly wasn't looking to make a lot of money. But nevertheless, I found myself in Kraków one summer as part of a seminar that my MFA program was running. And in my mind I thought, if they were going to pay for me to get over there, I might as well stay as long as I could. And if I was staying for several months, I might as well start trying to learn a little Polish. And you know how life leads in that way so eventually I found myself struggling along trying to learn a bit of Polish in order, ultimately, when I started, it was just to read poets who I had been reading and reading in English translation for many years to be able to perhaps one day read them in the original.

Later when I was living in Poland as a Fulbright fellow, I came across the work of Tomasz Ró?ycki. And I was drawn to his work, but also very aware that it did not exist at that point in English translation. He's a contemporary poet a few years older than myself. And he's also, I think, one of the most accomplished younger poets in Poland, certainly someone who I see as a very worthy successor to an amazing literary tradition. I was attracted to his distinctive, personal poetic voice that combines highly concrete imagery with evocative references to his historical legacy of his family and his time. And for Ró?ycki, this really means a history of his family and the dislocation that his family experienced after World War II. They had been living in what is now Ukraine and were forcibly migrated to the western part of what is now Poland when the border shifted after the war. And he really explores this sense of dislocation in his work.

I decided, or rather I should say, the writer in me decided to try my hand at translating a few of the poems from the five collections he had published to date. And that eventually led to a publication, his first English language publication, a selection of his work that came out with Zephyr Press in 2007. And that was his English language debut. And one of the editors from Zephyr just showed up, and I think she brought a couple of the books along with her if you'd like to take a look afterwards.

So I'm now working on translating his most recent, his sixth volume of poems called Colonies. And this volume definitely continues his thematic preoccupation with displacement. The book is made up of 77 deformed sonnets, and I say deformed sonnets because that's the way that critics have been talking about this work. And each of the sonnets has a title that brings to my 19th century travel narratives. Through this sonnet series, Ró?ycki explores the magic of childhood adventure stories and lore of tales from exotic locales or overseas colonies. But all of this also throughout the book suggests an inner journey as well.

And this is explored through a number of poems that are spaced throughout the book that all begin with the leading first line, "When I began to write, I didn't yet know..." So in this way, the book also becomes a meditation on the nature of writing itself, which we could think of writing as a form of dislocation. I think the nature of writing, the sense that he ultimately comes up with is that it's a kind of loss of childhood and a kind of ailment or invasion of the body. Those are the metaphors that he's playing around with here. And it is only the body in the end that knows the truth. So I'd like to read one of the sonnets to give you a sense of Ró?ycki's voice and the project.

The Governor's Residence. "When I began to write, I didn't know what I was really choosing and how much they'd pay. That I'd become so quickly rich that anything I'd want could soon be mine, the women and the cities of my dreams. That I would travel when and where I want in winter or in summer, go where I happen to point to on the map without a suitcase straight from bed without my pants. I'd settle in a fishing hut in Greece and someone would bring wine and olives daily and day-by-day my fortune would increase, and daily I'd stuck up on chocolate, butter that would sit there for I would feel no hunger."

So I hope you could hear in my translation that I followed a Iambic Pentameter in the sonnet in English and also tried to enhance certain rhymes that come out in the English. And here I'd like to turn to talking about the way in which I collaborate with Ró?ycki in these translations. I'm lucky that our collaboration is not a horror story, as it so often is for a translator working directly with a writer, who oftentimes thinks that they understand some English, and the author might want to make changes in the English translation, but they don't quite get the nuances there. Ró?ycki doesn't know any English, which is perhaps the way our collaboration works so well. He might ask, "So how then do we collaborate on the English translations?"

Initially, our collaboration was coming up with a strategy of how to approach the translation of the book. As you understand, it's a book of sonnets, so there's a formal consideration there. And I tried a handful of translations in a free verse form. And after sitting with those, we both decided that to do justice to the music in the Polish, that I should also follow a more formal constraint in the English, which meant an Iambic Pentameter to be an equivalent to the 13 syllable line, which is the sonnet in Polish. But I'm lucky in that Ró?ycki sonnets are deformed, which means that he doesn't always adhere to the strict form in Polish, and rhyme kind of happens here and there rather than all the time, every time that it should be there. So I was able to have that kind of flexibility in the English as well. And I've really, especially with the rhyme, it's a lot of fun to let it arise more organically and kind of tease it out as it comes up in the English.

Our collaboration also means discussing each translation in depth and this happens after I've worked up what I feel is a pretty solid translation in the English, which means I've gone through many drafts of it already and then I send it to Rozycki. He understands a little English and he's slowly learning more. So he'll look at it. He also speaks French, so he can kind of get a little bit of it there. More importantly, I send them a list of all of the most significant changes and decisions that I've made so that we can discuss those decisions. Sometimes these decisions might include adding an adjective or taking out a whole phrase or completely changing a metaphor that he's using in a poem. So I suppose you could say that at times we're somewhat rewriting or revising his poems in the English translations.

So to give you a brief example, this is from a poem called Tavern at the Harbor. And it ends with a metaphor that's a more direct translation would be something like, "There's a needle stuck above my heart." And when I was translating partly for the metrical requirements that I needed, and also I felt like the metaphor wasn't that impactful in English, so I changed it to, "There's a hook lodged near my heart." And the poem also has some imagery of it's called Tavern at the Harbor. So there's boats and fishing and all of that going on. So I felt the hook was justified and Ró?ycki also agreed. So small change, but metaphorically, I think more significant.

But for me, our collaboration is even more exciting when our dialogue results in a new reading or an additional interpretation to a line or a moment in a poem that I didn't even see initially as a reader and a translator. And so for an example with this, there's a poem in the collection called Drifting. And I want to read just the first few lines in Polish, so you can hear a little bit of the original language and then I'll talk about our dialogue with the translation.

[foreign language 00:14:11]

So my initial translation of the first two lines was, "Night trains Poland. A hand rolled cigarette slowly starts to glow from out of the ragged darkness." And when I was working with the meter, I decided to get rid of the additional information that this was a hand rolled cigarette. It didn't seem important to me in the translation. So I had, "A cigarette slowly starts to glow from out of the ragged darkness." And at first Ró?ycki email back, "Sounds fine." but then a couple days later I got another email that said, "Actually with that translation, we lose this whole other reading of the line, which results from the fact," I think I forgot to mention this before, that Polish is a very inflected language has a lot more flexibility with word order than English does. So that flexibility can allow for multiple readings that are harder to get in English.

And so the reading that I had [inaudible 00:15:26] out in the translation was that this cigarette was necessarily hand rolled because one reading would be, "It was hand rolled from the ragged darkness, out of the ragged darkness." So based on that, I revised to line the to, "A cigarette hand rolled from ragged darkness slowly starts to glow." Might seem like minor changes, but to get those nuances in the translation, these are the kind of things that we collaborate on.

So I want to just keep to my time so that we have enough time for everyone. But there is one other aspect that I see my work in translating Ró?ycki's poetry as collaborative. And I think that this is one way in which all translation is kind of a collaboration. So even for those who aren't collaborating with the author directly, they are still collaborating in terms of that third way in which a translator works and as Daniel Weissbort pointed out, and that is the translator as a critic.

Criticism in the realm of translation includes not only scholarly articles, but about the translated author, but also choices in terms of how to present that author to the target literary culture. A translator makes critical choices when he or she selects the poet to translate, selects which poems to include and what paratext to present so introductions, notes, jacket copy, blurbs, et cetera. This critical apparatus collaborates with or as a kind of dialogue with all the translations of that author that might have come before this one, but also a kind of dialogue with the image of that literature as it exists in translation. So I'm thinking here first, for example, of translations of a very canonical author that might've appeared numerous times, Dante, for example. So the critical apparatus of a new translation needs to argue for why this new translation is important.

But since Ró?ycki's work hadn't yet appeared in English, I wasn't faced with that particular challenge. But I was faced with a particular image of Polish poetry as it exists in English translation. And for anyone who's familiar with Polish poetry in translation, it does enjoy some fame in the US. And I'm thinking in particular of Czeslaw Milosz's influential anthology called Postwar Polish Poetry, which came out, I think, in 1965 and is still in print and still talked about widely, but also the story of Polish poetry as it's being told today, which includes names like [foreign language 00:18:30], Adam Zagajewski, and of course Milosz himself, names that a large number of Americans will be familiar with. But certainly there are poets in Poland, who are not writing in that tradition at all. But Ró?ycki does fit in that story that we in the West also tell about Polish poetry, but he challenges our expectations to some degree of what we expect from a Polish poet. And so I was very aware of all of this when I was making my selection and even choosing to present an unknown Polish poet in translation.

So my challenge in translating his work was to figure out how to situate him in relation to this canon of Polish poetry and how to, in other words, collaborate with and extend the work of those translators who had come before me. I chose to do this with a critical introduction to his work, although it's not an academic introduction and also a forward that Adam Zagajewski wrote. So in that way, he is very much situated in our understanding of Polish literature.

I don't have more time really to go into that second way in which I see translation as collaboration, but if anyone wants to talk about it during the Q and A, that would be great. So thank you very much.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Thank you, Mira. The next presenter is Lara Glenum. She's the author of two poetry books: the Hounds of No and Maximum Gaga, both from Action Books. She's the co-editor with Arielle Greenberg of Gurlesque, an anthology of women's poetry and visual art from Saturnalia Books. Her translations of Czech poetry have received an NEA translation fellowship, and she's currently collaborating with sound and visual artists on a multimedia installation piece. Lara Glenum.

Lara Glenum:

Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I am actually not going to talk about my translations of Czech poetry, which is something I do a good deal of the time. I would like to present for you all a different project in which I collaborated with my husband, who is a digital media artist. And it's part of a larger multimedia installation that has sculptural components. We installed it at Hallwall's Contemporary Gallery in Buffalo this fall. We'll be installing it again actually later this month. And it's a text-based video that draws heavily on the second half of my book, Maximum Gaga. And I think the way to approach it is simply to let you see it and field questions later. I'm in the awkward position of being the person, who is translated actually, right? My husband is the one who should rightfully be here and answering questions about the process of translating my work into video format. But since I live with him, I can probably field some of those questions too.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So Lara will take your questions later. The next collaboration is myself with Gabriela Jauregui. Gabriela Jauregui is the author of Controlled Decay from Akashic Books, Blackout Press. She holds an MFA from UC Riverside, and an MA from UC Irvine. Her writing has been published in journals and anthologies in the US, Mexico, and Europe. She's a PhD candidate in comparative literature at USC and a member of the Sur+ publishing collective in Mexico. And her books are also available like all of our presenters at the book fair across the street.

I'm Amaranth Borsuk, and I am also a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California in creative writing and literature. My work has recently appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Colorado Review and Denver Quarterly. My chapbook, Tonal Saw, was just published by the Song Cave, and I live in Los Angeles, where I co-curate The Loudest Voice, a reading series that pairs creative writers from USC with writers from the greater LA area. So we're going to be presenting from our collaborative translations of Paul Braffort. Gabby?

Gabriela Jauregui:

Yeah.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Can you do that? Maybe I'll talk a little bit about that. Please.

Gabriela Jauregui:

So while she opens our translations, I'll give you a quick background. Poet Paul Braffort is a member of the potential literature workshop, which in French is called [foreign language 00:23:02]. And the book, My Hypertropes Twenty-One Minus One programmatic poems was published in 1979, and it's not available in the States and neither is any of his work available in the US or in English for that matter. Okay, well, thanks.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Okay. So the work, the Hypertropes were a series of poems that Braffort wrote in dedication to the various members of the Oulipo in the year in which he wrote them, which was 1979. Each poem is dedicated to a different member of the Oulipo and adopts different constraints that the [foreign language 00:23:43] used in their work. In many cases, the constraint references the particular poet to whom the work is dedicated. And in reading the work, we were both kind of overwhelmed with the amount of extra literary references in each poem and the richness of the constraint and wordplay because Braffort is a total punster, and figuring out a way to work all of that into a direct translation was complicated. The diagram that you see is Braffort's map of how his poems connect one to the next.

Gabriela Jauregui:

Because his whole structure for ordering the book is based on the Fibonacci sequence, which for those of you who don't remember, it's 1, 1, 2, 3. So one number adds to the next number, and then that creates the following number in the sequence. So 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, et cetera. And so that's how he programmed. Poem number one would then put a program with poem number two lines that would be present in poem number three, and so on and so forth, until he ended up with the 20 poems dedicated to the then 20 members of the Oulipo. And for our translations, so as you can imagine, he has so many homophones and so many constraints, including sonnets, and we'll talk about them in a second. We decided to do a straightforward in quotation marks, I would say translation from the French into the English. And then with everything that was left over because there was much leftover or much that couldn't be worked in or much that we could have discussed in the translation, we decided to do our trans versions.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Right. So the trans version is this kind of third poem that runs alongside the first two in some cases providing material, like if there was a homophonic pun that if I were to translate it into English, you would lose the homophony. We then decided, okay, so in the third poem we'll do that but in English so that a reader gets a sense of what are the techniques that are being used. And I think the best way maybe to explain it is to show you one. So this is the 11th poem in the sequence, as you can see.

Gabriela Jauregui:

So I'll read it in French first.

[French 00:26:10]. And it's dedicated to LA.

[French language 00:26:16]

Amaranth Borsuk:

11. Big organs or the fixed priests [foreign language 00:26:45]. Come do not scorn so the attic of Patros. The coquettes glows be hyper for Omo, for neem that haunts. Oh, the intrigues pathos, snorting, grunt, roar, hatred that self adorns with the subtle games of yays and nos. But do cry if our elves, our pastoral nudes, compose a patronym.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And our trans version. Pop organs clean or [foreign language 00:27:19] for a Warhol.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Do you want to start? Sure. Ajax surfs at dawn while Ariel cheers on the Aquafresh tide.

Gabriela Jauregui:

Palm and olive gain pride and joy, small and mighty, the country safe.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Luxe snuggles under the cascade with scrubbing bubbles whisked into downy crests by the Irish spring.

Gabriela Jauregui:

All armed and hammered Mr. Clean doves a fairy bounce over the ivory snow and shouts, fabuloso ole.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So as you can see, the trans version is not at all a direct translation of the original poem. And what we were trying to work in were the reference in the second stanza to Omo, which is a laundry soap. There's a really funny commercial. It was very popular in Brazil. You can watch on YouTube about Omo soap. And when we caught this reference, we thought we would want to work that in. And in addition, if you want to talk about the Lati.

Gabriela Jauregui:

Right. So Lati, the member of the Oulipo who he dedicated this to was the one who came up with this drawing. What that says is Oulipo, so hence the patronym, right?

Amaranth Borsuk:

Right. It's their logo, so to speak.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And so then we were with the soap and the logo, we just decided to go for...

Amaranth Borsuk:

Logos. It turns out that there's this kind of buried poem within this poem that's about naming and creating the patronym, the logo for who you are as a writer. And we've got, as contemporary writers, a different set of references than Braffort had as a French male writer in 1979. We've got our own world of references. So we dedicate our poem to Andy Warhol, kind of the king of the logo.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And also our subtitle. All of his works have subtitles. And so our subtitle includes [foreign language 00:29:19], which is a pun on Pignatari, Décio Pignatari, the Brazilian concrete poet who did the famous poem Beba Coca-Cola. So that was another poem that included more sort of puns and games with...

Amaranth Borsuk:

With language and with logo.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And logos, yes, brands. So that-

Amaranth Borsuk:

So, that is how our translation becomes a trans version and the process is different for every poem. We had to come up with different games to play with ourselves, different ways to get inspired by the original to create something new that spoke to our own cultural references as poets in the 21st century.

Gabriela Jauregui:

So we'll read another one.

[French 00:30:05]. And this is dedicated to one of the very founders of Oulipo, François Le Lionnais.

[French 00:30:47]

Amaranth Borsuk:

12. Models or Petrovich's band for François Le Lionnais. For a sweet word from Emma, a word for model. For a black sign for a dozen feet of petrarch two tercets, three syntagmas make five asphodels and cradle the Pieros who go to Luna Park. They execute the song that executed Adele and scan the [inaudible 00:31:11] for the hierarch. Our galaxies have already packed their valise akin to asterisk, similar to taxis. They say from this time forth five letters to Elise who dies at [foreign language 00:31:24] of anorexia. She laughs at Ramoose's raft, tipsy and Pisa. Tragic tropes. Leonardo is Fibonacci.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And our trans version number 12, Models or Petrovich's band.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Oh.

Gabriela Jauregui:

Dandelion.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Oh, sorry.

Gabriela Jauregui:

A dandelion or infibulated bestiary.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So many pages.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And this is dedicated to the poet León Felipe. Leo, the lion of stand word, leopards, and known as Wild Ferris. They too are wonder wherever this the name lion has into root, but translated that.

Amaranth Borsuk:

The litters of creatures threes curly plane is fear. His first feature that to mountains pursued and that our savior, i.e spiritual, the rod sun places race, which had perished of that concealed dared themselves to...

Gabriela Jauregui:

His reward. Who this glory is keep in songs. I am asleep, my awake, behold. Nor to the third day breaks their makes did from a lions.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Is that they not unless decent for the the eaten too much when they to they are lions when...

Gabriela Jauregui:

So this was a completely different set of sort of rules that we set ourselves.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Right. So it's dedicated to François Le Lionnais and in Le Lionnais' name is the word lion. And there is this kind of leonine aspect to the poem that we wanted to bring out in our bestiary.

Gabriela Jauregui:

So first of all, that's why we chose a bestiary as a theme. Second of all, that's why we chose to dedicate it to the poet León Felipe, another poet with a leonine name.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So [inaudible 00:33:17] to approach this, what we did was we found T. H. White's 1954 Book of Beasts. It's a translation of a medieval bestiary, and we went to the lion section of the bestiary.

Gabriela Jauregui:

Yes. And so like Braffort's original poem has nine words per line. So we decided to keep that. And then we deleted, no, we didn't delete, we extracted rather the numbers of the Fibonacci series. The word, we counted the words in the Fibonacci series. So 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, et cetera. And those were the only words we could use to write our own poem.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So in every line, each word is the first word, second word, they correspond within the text to the numbers of the Fibonacci series.

Gabriela Jauregui:

What else? Yes. And then there's certain things. This is an example where the translation is a choice and it becomes an interpretation and just a complete, you have to choose one thing over another. The first line was a good example of this. In French, we had [French 00:34:28] and that is a homophonic pun with model. And therefore at the end he's talking about Elise, who's starving in anorexia at [inaudible 00:34:40], but it also means a word from her. So we decided to go with model, but you're missing the word from her part.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Model, right. And another thing that we should mention is the last line, Leonardo is Fibonacci that refers to Fibonacci's other name, which is Leonardo of Pisa. So it's a direct reference to Fibonacci within the original text that inspired us to go through the Fibonacci series within this medieval bestiary. Perhaps that's all we should say for now, and we would be happy to talk more about this process during Q and A.

Gabriela Jauregui:

And answer questions. Yes, thank you.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Yes, thank you.

So the final presentation will include Kate Durbin. She is the author of the poetry book, The Ravenous Audience from Akashic Books and the chapbook Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot from Dancing Girl Press. She has another chapbook Kept Women forthcoming from Insert Press as part of the Parrot series.

Kate Durbin:

Hello. So the project that Amaranth and I are working on is called Excess Exhibit, and it really does have to be experienced, I think, to fully be understood. But I want to just begin by giving you guys a summary that we've written up of the project before we dive into it.

So the book actually has illustrations by visual artist Zach Klein. And when we first started working on it, we really wanted to write about kind of an abstract concept of overabundance. So overabundance of sound, of self, of sense, but we had no idea that in doing so an ecstatic crossbreed would emerge both prophetic and post-human. So these poems, which we actually wrote them separately and then conjoined them so they have been crossbred, literally. Are about glorious mutation as well as the nature of collaboration itself. They're very ornate and visceral. They grow one into the other literally on the page, but also phonetically, recombining an evermore rapturous and ways until the helix of language and image spins out of control. And then the illustrations and text act as a flip book when the reader thumbs through the book.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So, there were a few different stages of translation in this project, which is a collaboration that wouldn't necessarily sound translational, but what we were dealing with was in the beginning anyway, a form of apheresis translating image into text. We selected about 20 images that we both really loved that had these themes of excess, of hairiness, a lot of ears because I wanted to be working sound into it. And we wanted to take those as jumping off points to create work, not literal phrases of the images, but rather or inspiration by the themes that are represented in these images.

Kate Durbin:

And a lot of the images were paintings or sculptures that I think we considered to be excessively beautiful, so much beauty that you almost wanted to swoon when you were looking at it. And then we wanted to do that, translate that into language.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Exactly. And part of the reason that Kate and I wanted to collaborate with one another is that we're really very different poets. As you can see, Kate is very much a performer, and her work has these wonderful elements of the erotic that I really wanted to get a chance to play with.

Kate Durbin:

And Amaranth is a very beautiful language poet, and I wanted to kind of learn from her. And I also thought that the beautiful sort of conjoining of the ecstatic language and the sexual language with language itself, the ecstasy of language itself could produce something really amazing.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So it's been a chance for us to do a form of translation in which we learned to speak one another's language, and in the process of these initial poems that were written separately, and then interlineated we were trying on one another's language, so to speak. And as we went through the revision process, that voice changed a lot. We ended up pairing away a lot of the extra language and creating this kind of third voice that emerges from the text. And she becomes the speaker of these poems.

Kate Durbin:

Yes, and we see her as almost a persona or kind of a post-human being that is like a hive mind conjoined. And we've actually in performance, when we perform the poems as well as each time the poems are published, we take a series of photographs that themselves are mutations of this being who in a sense is almost wearing and becoming the poems themselves as well as the being that speaks them into life.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Right. She's a conjoined version of the two of us, and yet far beyond the two of us. So each time we are conjoining ourselves, our aesthetics and this.

Kate Durbin:

And mutating and evolving, and we don't even know where it will go next.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Yes. And in addition, would you say a little more about the visual part of the text? Zach's part?

Kate Durbin:

Yeah. So my husband, Zach Klein is a visual artist, and we actually gave him the poems and had him do a drawing that, so he never saw the original images that we were using for inspiration. He just created drawings based on the poems. But he did an animation. So the text eventually when it's a book, will be a flip book. So the animation grows and the poems will also grow and they will mutate and merge together.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So this is the next step of the translation from image to word, back to image.

Kate Durbin:

Yes. And again, I just want to emphasize that it's really an experiential thing. So we're sitting here talking to you about it, but it's really something that, it's almost like an orgy in a sense. Everyone needs to join in excess exhibit and you could create something too and be a part of it. And so even talking about it feels a little strange because it really is something that you just need to dive in or, and often when we read, we do kind of more of a stance where we're more conjoined, but we're not doing that today.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Whirling.

Kate Durbin:

Capital architectural miniatures tucked in a twister.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Hillside city, a swirl, whitewash.

Kate Durbin:

Buttress, bouffant style lines, twine between abode.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Beneath this upsweep nidus. A studied on we to lapse.

Kate Durbin:

To prop, apropos Breton or bonnet, verdant [inaudible 00:41:41] turret.

Amaranth Borsuk:

A stride, a dames fo toy to nid nod.

Kate Durbin:

A green velvet bow in our glory bower to nestle.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Weave through a ribbon of familiars to hold total spiral.

Kate Durbin:

Spritz all houses on the bluff snatch thatch.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Amidst an arbor vortex, vertical blush, a spoon and stirring.

Kate Durbin:

Whirling capital.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Embarking.

Kate Durbin:

Architectural.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Embellishment.

Kate Durbin:

Miniatures tucked in.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Waves mount.

Kate Durbin:

A twister.

Amaranth Borsuk:

A frigate of.

Kate Durbin:

Hillside.

Amaranth Borsuk:

[inaudible 00:42:12].

Kate Durbin:

City.

Amaranth Borsuk:

A fresh it.

Kate Durbin:

A swirl.

Amaranth Borsuk:

To.

Kate Durbin:

Whitewash.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Pompadour. To frolic foundations.

Kate Durbin:

Buttress.

Amaranth Borsuk:

And powder party.

Kate Durbin:

Bouffant. Style lines twine.

Amaranth Borsuk:

To buoy.

Kate Durbin:

Between abode.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Down.

Kate Durbin:

Beneath.

Amaranth Borsuk:

The muff of.

Kate Durbin:

This ups swept nidus, a studied.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Circumstance, a rough to ore.

Kate Durbin:

On we to lapse.

Amaranth Borsuk:

To swan.

Kate Durbin:

Prop.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Amid.

Kate Durbin:

Apropos Breton.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Star.

Kate Durbin:

Or bonnet.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Sauce.

Kate Durbin:

Verden.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Seas.

Kate Durbin:

[inaudible 00:42:40] turret a stride.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Dawns a gret of bunting.

Kate Durbin:

[foreign language 00:42:44].

Amaranth Borsuk:

To wig.

Kate Durbin:

To nid nod.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Frisk feathers low.

Kate Durbin:

A green velvet bow in our.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Unruly.

Kate Durbin:

Glory bauer.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Breeze.

Kate Durbin:

To nestle weave through a.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Commode of cannons.

Kate Durbin:

Ribbon.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Cascade.

Kate Durbin:

Of familiar to hold total.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Pretty.

Kate Durbin:

Spiral.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Please.

Kate Durbin:

Spritz all houses on the bluff.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Skirt, oh, mermaid up.

Kate Durbin:

Snatched that.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Mast with this.

Kate Durbin:

Amidst an arbor vortex.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Nautilus pompon.

Kate Durbin:

Vertical blush.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Fluff, bodkin swash turned.

Kate Durbin:

A swoon and.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Froth.

Kate Durbin:

Stir.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Ing. Embarking embellishment waves mount.

Kate Durbin:

A frigate of poof, a fresh it to pompadour.

Amaranth Borsuk:

To frolic foundations in powder party. To buoy.

Kate Durbin:

Down the muff of circumstance, a rough to ore.

Amaranth Borsuk:

To swan amid star sauce seas.

Kate Durbin:

Dawn's egret of bunting to wig.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Frisk feathers, low unruly breeze.

Kate Durbin:

Commode of cannon's cascade to pretty please.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Oh, mermaid skirt up mast.

Kate Durbin:

With this Nautilus pompon, fluff bodkin, swash turned fur off-ing.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Thank you.

Kate Durbin:

Thank you.

Amaranth Borsuk:

So we'd like to open it up to questions. If anyone would like to ask a question of one of the presenters, please do. Yes?

Speaker 7:

I guess this can be to anyone who wants to answer it, but I'm curious in the difference between translation, trans version and inspired by. When does a translation become a trans version? When do you go too far to call it a translation? And I'm thinking I translate Lithuanian poetry and I sometimes have to take some liberty. And I've been inspired by Paul [inaudible 00:44:35] translations into German from English, and he takes a lot of liberty sometime. He makes it work because he's a genius. But I'm wondering what can be said about these differences and when you go too far.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Yeah, it seems like Gabby, would you like to talk to that maybe about Rothenberg and Joris and...

Gabriela Jauregui:

Well, what we took as inspiration for the trans version was the notion of [foreign language 00:44:59] the Brazilian, which is definitely a departure from the original into a new creation. So it's not sticking. So the more, it takes a lot of liberties. And we were thinking also of Jerome Rothenberg's writing through, which also takes a lot of liberties, and this is why we called it trans version. So we couldn't write in our right minds, call it a translation. But I don't think that any translation is ever quite faithful. I think that every translation is always already a version or perversion of the original, and it has to take its liberties and it has to be an adaptation. Otherwise, I don't think it's a successful, those very stunted translations that really try to stay as close as possible miss so much more of the essence to me of what it is. So I think, yes, there is definitely a far away departure, which is a trans version for us, which we couldn't call it translation. And then there's a translation, which is also already a departure, just not so distant, I would say.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Mira, did you want to talk to that at all?

Mira Rosenthal:

I guess in my mind, it kind of depends on how you present what you're doing. In other words, you can think of the Zukofsky's homophonic translations of Catullus. That they were, in essence taking a lot of liberties with meaning, but staying very true to sound. And they presented it as such as translations not as their own poetry. And so I think it really depends on how you're presenting your project. You can also think of Lowell's imitations as another version of how to present what some would call translation, what some wouldn't.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Any additional questions that we could address? Yes.

Speaker 8:

I was actually wondering, this question is for you and [inaudible 00:47:10]. The interaction of text with space. So your husband through your text [inaudible 00:47:14] flashing, and I'm wondering, was it originally faithful to that? Was that something you requested?

Lara Glenum:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that we hear a lot about poetry's relationship to music, but I actually think the poetry is part visual art because what it has available to it, that prose perhaps, I guess chooses not to avail itself of is the potential to manipulate the visual space on the page. So the visual elements of the poems are incredibly important to me. And that was a process. I mean, the whole thing, the meat out of the eater as it exists in the text is much longer. There are lots of many other series of poems. So we had to initially make a cut, and once that cut was made, then there was a lot of attention to trying to retain the visual effect of the page. But of course, a moving dynamic visual field is quite different, especially since it has music and things like that. But yeah, yeah, definitely important.

Kate Durbin:

Well, we're kind of in the process of figuring out space right now, and it's extremely tricky because we want the poems and the visuals to be as equally glorious, and his images are so beautiful that we're really struggling right now with making the poems on the page look that good and have enough space and be big enough. So I would say that that's, I guess our challenge right now. And our ultimate goal, and I would totally agree with what Lara said about it is visual art. I don't know why some people think it's not, but I know a lot of text-based visual artists too, and they don't consider themselves to be poets. So yeah, very important.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Yeah, especially since it's a thematic part of our work, the idea of mutation and conjoinment, that these lines began as conjoined interlineations, but really that wasn't enough of a conjoinment. That's sort of false. To actually get them to merge with one another, we want them on the page to actually mimic this act of coming together. And the poem that we read where we were sort of taking turns in those cases, some of those words come from the poem on the page before, and some come from the poem on the next page. So we have this intermediary poem that emerges out of the two other poems that we've written by merging the language. And that has been a process for us to figuring out how to do that, how to make that work.

Kate Durbin:

Yeah, they're literally mutating and evolving into each other in an overlapping sense, and creating new poems.

Amaranth Borsuk:

Any other questions? Thank you very much for coming. It was a pleasure to speak with you and read for you, and it means a lot that you came. So thank you.

Speaker 9:

Thank you, Amaranth, for putting this together.

Amaranth Borsuk:

My pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP podcast series. For other podcasts, please tune into our website at www.awpwriter.org.