Thursday, October 29, 2015

Barcelona Spain Reading the 30th Oct and Workshop the 31st Oct

JKD and MN reflected over "old" Barcelona model at the Maritime Museum
Michelle Noteboom and I are in Barcelona, Spain this week on a sort of nostalgia return trip here after our last Oct visit in 2013 when we were also joined by Bonny Finberg. We find the city fabulously warm and welcoming and of course the sun lingering into the fall with its welcome warmth is not to be missed. But we are also honored to be reading here again, and I am also doing a writing workshop: see here is some key info for those events should you be here and want to join, and a few pictures for those who just want to bask in the beautiful Barcelona air vicariously!

LECTURE / READING:
Michelle Noteboom and Jennifer K Dick 
+ open readings for interested authors who want to share work!
9pm Oct 30th at Collage, 96 Sant Salvador, Barcelona
Two American poets, Jennifer K Dick and Michelle Noteboom, will read their poems on Friday, October 30, at Collage. All Collage events are must-see, but Jen and Michelle aren’t in Barcelona nearly often enough, and you don’t want to miss this opportunity to hear them. Please bring work to read in the open reading. For more information or to RSVP: see the Facebook event invitation: https://www.facebook.com/events/999618416776113/

WRITING WORKSHOP: GENERATIVE WRITING
with JENNIFER K DICK:
5-7pm Oct 31st at Collage, 96 Sant Salvador, Barcelona
DESCRIPTION: Open to authors of prose, poetry or mixed genre works, this Saturday afternoon workshop is about starting, and starting again, providing tips, techniques and some triggering exercises to get ink onto and into the white page. For authors, each day, each page brings us a sense of accomplishment and the excitement of getting somewhere even when we battle to find a single line that works for us. So, to generate and work at attaining some tips that can be used to generate new writing, we will try our hand at a variety of exercises and techniques to warm up, redirection, and get going writing prose, poetry or prose poems/flash fiction. We will also read some short texts by other authors as part of some of the writing exercises we will try our hand at this afternoon. At the end of the workshop, you will leave with a few beginnings, and perhaps also a finished draft or two. A course for writers at all levels.
LOGISTICS/FEE: To sign up, contact "Emilie" via her email at: collagebarcelona [at] gmail [dot] com / or call 93.284.6520. 20€ fee covers photocopies, space and the course. 
ADDRESS: Barcelona, Spain at Collage (Sant Salvador 96, metro: Lesseps).
RSVP on the Facebook event page, too, at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1693181307583637/ 
Valerie Coulton and Ed Smallfield--poets residing in Barcelona--with Jennifer K Dick and Michelle Noteboom at Palmera Restaurant
Me (Jennifer K Dick) in front of an old map at the Barcelona Maritime Museum
Michelle Noteboom at work writing in our Barcelona flat
Michelle Noteboom and Jennifer K Dick playing "divers of yore" outside the Barcelona Maritime Museum
In the Parc Juan Miro which we discovered is not near the fondacio

The Amazing fountains descending in front of the Museo of Catalan Art


Monday, October 26, 2015

Post-21st October conference pictures Cole Swensen and Jennifer K Dick

L-R: Cole Swensen, Jennifer k Dick, Christine Bertin, Laetitia Sansonetti

L-R: Cole Swensen, Jennifer k Dick, Christine Bertin, Laetitia Sansonetti
Last week was full of excitement: And here are 2 pictures as the evening on 22nd Oct 2015 of reflection on "Poets who translate and self-translate" AT: TRILL research group, Université de Paris X: Nanterre wound down. Cole Swensen and I were honored to be invited by TRILL and seminar organizers Laetitia Sansonette and Christine Bertin who run a series of guest talks for Paris Nanterre University on various aspects of translation. They are also organizing what looks to be a great conference for January 8th 2016.  For the 21st of Oct, Cole and I decide to each propose and present a few "key" thoughts on translation in general, then we did "readings" of specific issues and poems that the other author had self-translated. 
     I did a little comparison-contrast of Cole's own translations of some of her poems form her most recent collection: Landscapes from a train (Nightboat books) and the translation of those same poems that have been done by Nicholas and Mai Pesques. 
     Cole discussed the issues of sound translation vs re-writing and neologism uses and possibilities in my work from the "Traces de son amant qui s'en va" show last spring in Mulhouse. 
     As the evening wound down, I left full of new ideas and reflections on the processes and issues for myself as a writer-translator and I hope that the faculty members and graduate students we met enjoyed the evening seminar as much as I did.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Take the survey! QUESTIONNAIRE on Autotranslation and Multilingual Writing

The survey below is for authors, and my focus is mostly on contemporary poets, who write in more than one language fluently and who also translate other writers. The focus is auto-translation vs translation by others. I am interested in the process of translation, self-translation and re-writing across languages as related to creative process, receptivity, invisibility, diaspora, translocality, transnationality, collaborative translation and collaborative writing, distribution, the sense of the contemporary engagement in translation as a form of writing and rewriting and multilingualism as a visual-textual mode of expression. I thank you for your time in answering any of the questions below, and also for passing this along to authors you think would like to answer it. Please return your completed questionnaire as a Word or PDF file to Jennifer K Dick at fragment78 at gmail.com 

Name :
Email: (If you would like to receive a copy of any resulting paper from this questionnaire):
Languages you speak/write fluently:
Number of books published:
Genre(s) you write in :


TRANSLATION:
Genre(s) you translate writing by other authors in and works translated (if you are an extensive translator, select a few key translations please):

What is it that drew you to the first books/works you translated? And what draws you to a particular work today?

How does a translation you completed of someone else’s original work feel to you in comparison to a completed book of your own original writings?

Have you worked on collaborative translations? If so, could you share a few thoughts on how the process of collaborative translation differs from translating on your own?

Has your own work been translated by others?
Into languages you speak or languages unfamiliar to you? (please name the languages and whether you speak them, too)

If your work has been translated into other languages which you speak/write, why is it you have preferred to have the work be translated by others?


AUTOTRANSLATION / WRITING IN ANOTHER or MULTIPLE LANGUAGE(S):
On the topic of writing your own creative work in more than one language, first, do you?
If so, could you share some thoughts on how writing in each language differs for you, or some insight into your process (as in, do you tend to proceed in one then the other language, or do both simultaneously?). If you do not write in more than one language; could you address the reasons you have for using only one of your languages (ie: distribution, living in that language, it being your own “private” language if you live in another language, audience, to keep a language alive, etc.)?

If your work is written in one single language, do you translate or rewrite your own works into other languages? If so, what is this experience like for you? How do you proceed (if you have a particular method)? Do you tend to do so alone or in collaboration with others?

What do you seek or what speaks to you in the process of writing in another language?

Do you ever use translation as a revision method? If so, how, & what does it give to the process?

Do you mix languages in single works? If so, could you share some thoughts on how this has worked for you?  Also, if so, if the work is translated later into a second language, do you include multilingual translations to incorporate multiple languages in the target text (ie, if the original is dominantly English with French moments, do you reverse translate and put the original French into English in a French translation, or in some other way maintain that cross-lingual experience?)

Again, thank you for your time!!! AND please add anything you like on this topic.

Thursday, October 08, 2015

CERN 70 by Jennifer K Dick as a tip of the hat to the 2015 Nobel Prize announcements

CERN 70
by Jennifer K Dick

I dreamt that, rejected for the Nobel yet again, I decided to go on a rampage, get my revenge, show the 2014 selection committee what I was really worth. No, this was not one of those physicist-strolls-across campus shoot’em outs. Rather, during the ceremony, as everyone perked up to be enlightened by Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura’s speech on their fantastic blue LED light research in front of a large gathering of followers celebrating the 275th anniversary of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, I sent a massive pulse (blue, of course) through the tuxedo-laden room. Everyone vanished. Then, a few minutes later, they reappeared. What happened? Well, I’d shot them back in time to the original ceremony for the first prize in 1739. I didn’t leave them there for long, but upon their return they all found nice, hand-embossed cards by their seats with, in golden letters, “This time-travelling experience brought to you by 8th-time finalist for the Nobel. Feel free to take note. Hope you enjoyed the ride.” So, as you can see, I am impatiently awaiting the October announcement for the 2015 prize.


(NOTE: the 2015 prize in Physics has just been announced: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/ It was "awarded jointly to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald 'for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass'". For anyone interested in the Nobel Prize for physics history, see: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/facts/physics/index.html. I guess I now need to write one of these CERN poems about my character's hopes for the 2016 prize! It is hard to stay ahead of these things!)