I have started work on some sound based translations of the beautiful Mina Loy’s poetry. Her poems are composed of striking language and I was afraid that in losing these words in the translation the results would be very much impoverished. However it occurred to me that making too direct comparison with the original is not the point of the exercise. A permission to continue? Geraldine Monk talks about her collaborations with the dead (they can’t answer back) and makes the point that ‘collaboration with the dead is collaboration without permission’ (quoted in the Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk). This using other writers’ work is bothersome. It feels something like cheating to not create my own poem from scratch on a blank page without help from a finished piece by someone else. But then why the cry that in order to write you must read. To what end if not to learn from who you read. Yes, the technique I am using produces a new poem that is heavily indebted to the original poem that it is a sound based translation of, but the new poem is created, as the technique suggests, as a skewed sound mirror of the original. Most interesting for me is how the new poem continues some of the sense of the original, even though it is composed of different words, and how concentrating on creating sound effects dictates word choice and enters ‘surprise’ meanings in the new poem. Perhaps the time of year and the state of the economy is seeping into my writing as today’s translation of the wonderfully titled ‘Wing Shows on Starway Zodiac Carousel’ has more than a hint of politics in it. Very unintentional. And no, I haven’t come up with anything to match that title yet. Not sure I’ll try.
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October 2017
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