Straight quotes, square brackets: Page-based poetics inflected with the syntax and grammar of code languages
In English, the word “translation” is formed of two parts. The prefix trans- meaning
across, beyond, or through, is applied to the word -lation, from the Latin, latio, meaning borne, as in carried or endured. I must confess from the outset that I am more interested in trans- than in -lation. Trans- as I will use it here refers to a process, a movement, an event; -lation is a commitment, a burden, work.
The prefix trans- may be used to span vast distances: transcontinental, transatlantic. Or, it may imply a state of change: transmit, transfer, transport. Or, somewhat more abstractly, it may imply a poetics of coming and going: transverse. From the Latin versus: literally, a turning, to turn. Every verse has a re-verse. In Greek verse, Strophe speaks from east to west across the stage. Antistrophe replies from west to east. Neither voice is in either place. Both are calling: across, beyond, through.
As a writer, and as a migrant, I live and work in in-between places and spaces: between English and French languages, between print and digital media; between poetry and academia. In English it seems, one is often caught between extremes: between a rock and a hard place, between the frying pan and the fire. So too in translation, a perception of dualism persists: between the pre-text and the post-text, the original and the copy. In French, “between” is a third space – l’entrespace. This article will occupy this third space as a dynamic site of intersection. It will be written in English, but it will think in part in French.
This article builds upon a paper that was presented at “Multilingual Digital
Authorship,” a symposium hosted by Erika Fülöp at Lancaster University on 8 March 2018. That paper was later expanded into a public lecture which was presented at the Heine Haus Literaturhaus Düsseldorf, at the invitation of the Summer School Literaturübersetzen: Translation and the Digital World, on 28 June 2019. I bring these presentation contexts, which might otherwise be relegated to a footnote, into the body of the text here to highlight both the disciplinary frameworks which have informed this thinking, and the processes of translation already in operation in this text. This article traces the translation of texts between cultural and linguistic contexts, between academic and public-facing audiences, between print, digital, and performed forms.
In its current iteration as an online publication this article continues an on-going
exploration of the movement of language across, beyond, and through in-between
spaces. The idea of “between” is considered here as a third time/space/state, a texture, an event, a palpable unfolding fraught with cacophony, liminality, atemporality and asynchronous exchanges. In keeping with its transient subject, this article will alternate between lyrical and analytical modes.
