From the White of the Page by Jennifer K Dick at Poetry in Expanded Translation III 4-6 April 2018

VERY excited to be heading off towards the Poetry in Explanded Translation III: Poetry and Sound conference in Bangor, Wales, to give this talk. Please find the full schedule and email links to ALL of the talks and readings below, including thrilling events with Erin Mouré, Caroline Bergvall and Lisa Samuels among others.

 My abstract for the talk I will give on Friday morning, the 6th of April in the 9am session:

FROM THE WHITE OF THE PAGE

Jennifer K Dick

Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse, France

Labo de recherche : ILLE

 

This talk will take as its focus issue of the conference, the question of whether the relationship between poet and translator can (or must in the case of sound and certain visual poetries) be compared with that of composer and performer. The reading of the page as score, the use by authors of visual signs, erasures, font, invented languages, even poster-sized pages and typographical gestures as graphic representation of breath and sound, semantic elements that are often extra-lingual, are fundamental components of what and more specifically how these poems are meant to be heard/read/seen/experienced. (Parallels may be drawn between these pages and contemporary music scores of Boulez, Cage and others.) To accentuate the focus on sound as poetic meaning, I have selected primarily French author’s works as my focus for this talk for an anglophone audience. I will discuss sample cases of page-voice translation from the “scored” pages of Julien Blaine, Patrick Dubost and Bernard Heidesieck as well as the visual-poetry to sound-poetry pages of Jacques Sivan and Vannina Maestri. Discussions of these works will be rooted in theoretical and practical references to Mallarmé, the Zaum poetries of Russian Klebnikov and some Dadaist and Italian Futurist’s works. What will be interrogated is the question of any oral “reading” as translation, not only by author but also as musical “interpretation” (and might one say reinterpretation, or variation) by other readers based on each individual’s methods of seeing and hearing these pages.

Full Conference Schedule and links: 

Poetry in Expanded Translation III

Poetry and Sound in Expanded Translation

April 4th to 6th 2018
Bangor University
Wales

http://expanded-translation.bangor.ac.uk/conf/programme.php.en

 

About the Conference

This international and interdisciplinary conference will consider the role of sound in poetry translation, and in related areas of performance and creative practice. How helpful is a musical vocabulary in discussion of the sound of a poem in translation? Conversely, what is meant by describing music as a language? Can the relationship between poet and translator be compared with that of composer and performer? Such parallels will be used to explore poetry in bilingual, multilingual and cross-artform contexts. Examining new and emerging interfaces between poetry, sound and translation, this conference will bring together poets, musicians, critics and translators.

 

Keynote speakers

Caroline Bergvall, artist, writer and performer
Lawrence Venuti, translation theorist, Professor at Temple University

Keynote Performance

Andrew Lewis, composer, Professor at Bangor University

Programme

The conference will begin with dinner, readings and performances on the evening of April 4th. There will be two full days of papers on the 5th and 6th, with parallel sessions, and another reading on the evening of the 5th. Panels will finish at 17.30 on April 6th

http://expanded-translation.bangor.ac.uk/conf/programme.php.en#friday

Wednesday 4th April

4.00 Registration in School of Music

5.00 Welcome reception in School of Music foyer.

6.00
Poetry and music in Powis Hall
Keynote performance:
Andrew Lewis, Bangor University

LEXICON
Poetry readings:
Erín Moure
Philip Terry
Lee Ann Brown

8.00 Dinner in Matthias Hall

Thursday 5th April

8.45 Coffee

9.00 FIRST PARALLEL SESSION

Rhythms and echoes:

Jessica Stephens, Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
Sound and rhythm in translation in the poetry of Alice Oswald

Sam Trainor, Université de Lille
From transparency to trans-resonance: translation as contrapuntal poiesis

Zoë Skoulding
Echo in the work of Vahni Capildeo

Homophonies:

Ollie Evans
Can homophony practise philology?

Simon Smith, University of Kent
What’s the frequency Gaius: The Zukofskys’ Catullus and the failure of translation

Andres Andwandter
Translation as reconstituting the foundations of the state

10.30 Coffee

PONTIO Cemlyn Jones Lecture Room 2

10.45 Keynote:

Lawrence Venuti, Temple University
Translation Proverbs: The Instrumentalism of Conventional Wisdom

11.45 Pause

12.00  SECOND PARALLEL SESSION
Borders:

Erín Moure
Sound in the mouth and Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea

Dan Eltringham and Leire Barrera Medrano
Girasol Press: sonidos sin fronteras / sounds without borders

Bodies:

Kristina Hagstrom Stahl, Gothenburg University
Acts of translation in Charlotte Delbo's theatrical poetics

Julia Lewis, Cardiff University
What is lost when words are wasted between medicine and poetry?

1.0      Lunch and coffee

2.00 THIRD PARALLEL SESSION

Musics 1:

Meirion Jordan
Dán, Amrhain, Piob: Translating lyric to music in Gaelic traditional practice

Jeff Hilson, Roehampton University
Music and translation

Alys Conran, Bangor University
From flamenco to cerdd dant, Lorca to penillion telyn: multilingual remixes of Welsh and Spanish music poems

Resounding:

Lily Robert-Foley, Université de Montpellier
Do extra-terrestrials have rhetoric? A fictocritical reflection on translating a language that doesn't exist (yet)

Lisa Samuels
Tomorrowland (talk and film)

3.30 Tea

3.45 FOURTH PARALLEL SESSION

Sound in communication:

Khashayar Naderehvandi, University of Gothenburg
Tacit intimacies

Sophie Collins
Intimacy and fidelity: relationship models and the sounds of friendship in translation

Chris McCabe and Vahni Capildeo
Blackbox Testing

Performance and collaboration:

Helen Tookey and Martin Heslop
Collaborative poetry and sound work in process

Ghazal Mosadeq and Katherine E. Bash
Creative Translation of Talismanic Texts (talk and performance)

5.15 Drinks Reception

6.00 Poetry performance in Pontio Arts Centre

8.00 Dinner in Cledwyn Terrace Room 3

Friday 6th April

8.45 Coffee

9.00 FIFTH PARALLEL SESSION

Ekphrases:

Agata Holobut, Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Painting into sound: phonosymbolism in ekphrasis

Piotr Gwiazda, University of Pittsburgh
Dear Beloved Humans: Listening to Grzegorz Wróblewski

Jennifer K. Dick, Université de Haute Alsace
From the white of the page

Musics 2:

Nisha Ramayya
Sound, subjectivity, ritual and community

James Wilkes
Mishearing and slippage in writing towards Josquin des Prez

Richard Hoadley
Semaphore/Choregrams

10.30 Coffee

PONTIO Cemelyn Jones Lecture Room 2
10.45 Keynote:
Caroline Bergvall, poet
Monolingualism is dangerous

11.45 Pause

12.00 SIXTH PARALLEL SESSION

Silence and listening:

Mounir Ben Zid, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
Rethinking the Perception of Personal Silence in Poetry and Translation

Vincent Broqua
Silent translation?

Othering:

Mary Jacob, Aberystwyth University, and Rhys Trimble
Rhizomatic meaning generation across languages and non-languages

1.00 Lunch

2.00 SEVENTH PARALLEL SESSION

Mistranslations:

Peter Hughes
On re-creational versions of Giacomo Leopardi’s Cantos

Jeremy Over
Sounds Funny: mistranslation and misunderstanding in the poetry of Ron Padgett and Kenneth Koch

Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn
Willful mistranslations

Places:

Katharina Kalinowski, Universities of Kent and Cologne
Sounding Places: Ec(h)otranslations

Steven Hitchins
Translating the urban environment in the South Wales Valleys

Rowan Evans
Ancient Language, Landscape and Hybridity

3.30 Tea

3.45 Panel discussion with Nia Davies, James Byrne and Sophie Collins
Publishing and Expanded Translation

4.30 Plenary

5.15 Close

6.00 Launch of Robert Sheppard's Twitters for a Lark

7.30 Dinner at a local restaurant

5 Poems by Jennifer K Dick in Women Poetry Migration a Theenk Books anthology

Now out, containing 5 of my poems from my forthcoming Eyewear, London, UK book That Which I Touch Has No Name (2019) is the anthology Women: Poetry: Migration (Theenk Books, 2018). Each poetry selection is followed by a mini essay by the author, such as one found in the great experimental poetry anthology a few years back edited by Etter, one of the poets in this collection which is here edited and prefaced by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa.

The book "women: poetry: migration [an anthology]", 326 pp., ISBN 978-0-9883891-6-8, $25.00 USD, is edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, featuring poetry and accompanying essays by 50 women living in a country other than that of their birth, and it is now on sale.  

I am thrilled to find my work next to poets I have LONG admired, such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Norma Cole or N Nourbese Philip as well as friends whose work I continue to admire greatly, such as Donna Stonecipher, Jody Pou, Barbara Beck, Adeena Karasick, Yuko Otamo and MANY others I will hope you will go and discover for yourselves!

Visit the publisher's website to order, theenk Books: http://www.therepublicofcalifornia.com/theenk/theenkBooks.htm.  For a list of the contributors, please visit the website.  Inquiries: theenkbooks(at)twc.com
What some readers and Critics have had to say about this anthology:

"Exile (to echo Edmond Jabès) is a fundamental condition of poetry.These 50 poets make diaspora home ground. They are the lightning rods of a non-national poetry of “between” that pushes against nativism through sheer aesthetic exuberance and necessity of innovation." -- CHARLES BERNSTEIN

"Women : Poetry : Migration is a superb, refreshing anthology.  As nationalism and the rigidity of territorial and linguistic boundaries, under challenge, erode, this anthology of poetry by women provides a wide-ranging and innovative look at this migratory time in the writing of poetry.  Migratory in terms of place and the changing nature of location, undergoing challenge and redefinition in terms of gender identity, and in transit as a polylingual consciousness and multilingual ways of writing become more and more evident.  My congratulations to the editor for her vision, imagination, and persistence, and to the women who have contributed such remarkable writing to the anthology." --HANK LAZER

"Jane Joritz-Nakagawa has undertaken a remarkable editorial task in bringing together avant-garde women poets who are also migrants.  If, as Susan Suleiman wrote, the avant-garde woman poet is doubly marginalised, then these poets are in a triple lock of marginalisation.  Yet, as the anthology demonstrates, this can be a source of strength and transformation, which gives them a centrality, not only in their own lives, but in the cultural development of their adopted country.  Indeed, some of these poets have played a crucial role in shaking up mainstream poetics."--FRANCE PRESLEY

"“on google earth I write down my name” writes Ania Walwicz in this ecstatic anthology, women: poetry: migration. With sharp eye and ear, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa has gathered arresting, often experimental, poetry by women living outside the lands of their birth. These are poems where the “trans” – translation; transculture; transformation –inhabits the unsettling language of identity and location, with multiplicity, cosmopolitanism and the “push and pull” (Bella Li) of writing desire. Every page offers shifts of imagery or perspective as witness to embodiment, alterity, and hybridities of language. In the plural worlds of the poets, we hear how border crossing constructs a life (Fawzia Afzal-Khan) and “utopianism” always “goes wrong” (Donna Stonecipher)." --ANNE ELVEY

“Where am I going? I am getting there.”  Amanda Ngoho Reavey’s words might serve as a motto for this wide-ranging, transnational anthology, which gathers 50 women poets who live in countries other than the ones in which they were born.  This premise is the spark for an explosion of aesthetic experimentation that both maps and crosses boundaries of gender and nation.  From the shuttling between Japan and Canada, Vietnam and Australia, or Zimbabwe and the United States, the authors gathered here elucidate a poetics formed in process."--TIMOTHY YU

"My response to this collection is subjective as I was once someone who lived and wrote for a while outside of my native land. In women: poetry: migration, I could relive the excitement of pleasurable dislocation I felt some of the time I lived abroad. For instance, I liked experimenting or “deconsecrating” one language with another language to “make it clearer” (Jody Pou) and discovering through writing “what I don’t know” (Tsitsi Jaji). That being said, this collection is open to any reader who is engaged by thoughtful, sensual, humorous and political ideas.  In her essay in this anthology, Rosemarie Waldrop concludes, “If the poem works…it will set off vibrations in the reader, an experience with language — with the way it defines us as human beings.” I certainly felt the reverberation of language(s) as I read the poems and essays in this collection. It’s up to us as readers what we do next." --DEBORAH RICHARDS

"This anthology edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is more than a poetic fact. It is a political fact because it presents to the public poets displaced from their countries and in a real conflict with theircultures. Perhaps this is the definition of poetry: art in conflict with language and origin. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa offers to the reader double exiles: the exile of the tongue and the full "exile" of the female voice in patriarchal societies. Joritz-Nakagawa, in the words of the Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade, reinstitutes the "matriarchy of Pindorama." It is a work of breadth and rigor, which deserves all attention and applause. As contributor Safaa Fathy says: “I write about what I lost.” Migrating is at the center of being a poet; the book also answers the question of what poetry is. And maybe this is the gain that Joritz-Nakagawa’s anthology brings."--REGIS BONVICINO

Forthcoming talk announcement A Cyborgian Metaphysics of the Poetic Self

I am thrilled to announce that the thrilling SAIT group (Arts Images Textes) in France has accepted my proposal for a talk for the 2018 58th SAES conference at Nanterre University in Paris, 7-9 juin 2018 on the topic of Revolution(s) where Angela Davis (can you believe it!) is the invited speaker of honor for the general SAES Keynote.

My talk title and information are below in case you wish to check them out. I have some work to do before then for this and feel thrilled to be engaging more deeply with the writing of Bhanu Kapil and Jacques Sivan--two authors I amire personally, read and reread avidly and whose work I have addressed separately in quite different manners during previous conferences. Bringing the two together and under the umbrella of Cyborgs is going to be a fabulous experience for me!

A Cyborgian Metaphysics of the Poetic Self: Bhanu Kapil and Jacques Sivan

abstract proposal by Jennifer K Dick,

MdC, UHA Mulhouse, Labo de recherche: ILLE

This comparative talk plans to explore the imagined Cyborg as self and the metaphysical questions this alternative, dual reality imposes on the writing of poetic autobiography as seen in works by Amercan-based of Indian background author Bhanu Kapil (specifically Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Leon Works, 2006) and French author Jacques Sivan (specifically Notre Mission, Al Dante, 2018 and the manuscripts for this work). In both texts the individual is subsumed or paralleled by a kind of avatar, the cyborgian body (A.I. mechanical vs biological). The exploration of autobiography within a space of multiple identities (both digital and biological), reader-text interface, gender, desire and sexuality, travel/migration, and notions of truth when speaking of the author/narrator/speaker as “I” are subjected to innovative and complex renderings because of this cybernetic virtual reality. In the case of Kapil, the desire seems to be to render the past into current multiplicities of identity whereas for Sivan the result, as he composes this unfinished manuscript while dying of cancer and becoming, as he said directly, a kind of real cyborg as his biological functions became increasingly mechanized due to interventions by medical science, is to project himself beyond his life into his alter ego, Aborijak. In Sivan’s case, this Cyborg of the last generation, “more advanced than Hal 2000”, and who will reach into the future, into our now, the next now, as current and future generations of readers interface with the text, also touches on Cryogenics, AI post-biological mortality projecting the author into an imagined digital immortality: the book literally becomes “Notre Mission”.

These works are not digital creations, but they explore the metaphoric and metaphysical issues inherent in our internet-connected increasingly robotic worlds where existence, interchange, and digital reality subsume the “real real”—raising the question of what is lived experience, and how do contemporary artists and authors engage with this question in the digital era?

Critical work supporting my close examination of Kapil and Sivan’s books will come from many of the books cited in the SAIT group's CFP, such as Donna Haraway, Katherine N Hales or Jens Hauser and may also extend into authors which they have listed but which I am only now reading for the first time—in particular Aarseth, Bontems, Braidoti or Vial’s works and the collection Le sujet digital.

Bio note:

Jennifer K Dick competed her PhD at Paris III in Comparative Literature in 2009 and has since 2010 been working as a MdC at UHA, Mulhouse. She is a specialist in 20^th-21^st century text and image work, specifically in poetry and language-based visual art work, though has also published in the arena of translation in social sciences. She is currently the French co-organizing partner in the 18-month long Arts and Humanities Research Council grant-receiving fellowship for a series of 3 conferences on “Poetry in Expanded Translation” 2017-2018. The first was translation as rewriting (held at The National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London April 2017), the second on intersemiotic translation between text and image (held at UHA, Mulhouse in Nov 2017) and third is on Visual Sound and translation as re-sounding work (to be held in Bangor, Wales in April 2018). 

 http://congres2018.saesfrance.org/

Paris Reading 3 Dec Jennifer K Dick for Academy of American Poets in Paris

The Academy of American Poetry fall 2017 series on American Poets in Paris and Berkeley Books of Paris will host author Jennifer K Dick at Berkeley Books, 8 rue Casimir Delavigne, on Sunday Dec 3^rd, at 19h30.

Jennifer will read from the cross-lingual text Afterlife, published by AngelHouse Press, Canada in June 2017 and extracts of some new work.

The reading will close with a few songs from Bremner Duthie!

On Afterlife:

"The echoing question of the mark that language leaves on us all and makes of us all is celebrated here in Dick's lyrical recall of the invention of drawing, while her English/French parallel enacts the question of presentation vs representation in yet another way. The parts all come together in a marvelous tumult, endlessly breaking down and endlessly rebuilding." —Cole Swensen

“The ideal creator: Jennifer K Dick articulates the inventor/invented myth of Dibutade in delicate charcoal words that revel in the limits of language.”—Lisa Pasold

"Engager une réflexion sur le langage avec une intrication audacieuse - et rare -  de l'anglais et du français, au travers de la légende mythologique de Dibutade, voilà le projet poétique d'Afterlife. Dans une écriture kaléidoscopique, Jennifer K.Dick s'attache avec virtuosité à interroger ce qui fait trace et ce qui nous trace, nous forme, nous silhouettes humaines. Un livre tout en "point d'ombrelumière"."—Virginie Poitrasson

BIO: Jennifer K Dick is a writer, translator, teacher and literary events organizer originally from Iowa

who now resides in France. She is the author of CIRCUITS (Corrupt, 2013), ENCLOSURES (BlazeVox eBook, 2007), FLUORESCENCE (University of GA Press, 2004), and 6 chapbooks, most recently Afterlife by Angel House Press, Canada (2017) and Comme Un n°9, a collective work with 4 Japanese artists (2017). Jennifer is also the editor of two critical books on translation theory in the social sciences and translates French poets. She has been curating Ivy Writers Paris bilingual reading series since 2005 and the Ecrire l’Art mini-residency for French authors at La Kunsthalle-Mulhouse since 2010. Her increasing interest in collaborative projects with other authors, artists and dancers led to a 2016-2017 architecture-text installation at the Basel SBB Train Station in Switzerland (visible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmye8THGxww) and the 75 minute live show Traces de son amant qui s’en va (May 2015). She is part of Le Collectif with Italian and French poets from which the 2013 Benway Series Foglio 9 was published and 2 films, one in which she reads, Le Moulin by Gilles Weinzaepflan, 2013, (https://vimeo.com/101581345). Her poem Radial filmed by Lisa Pasold is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhFqjW0hruw New work appears in Parentheses (Barcelona), Tears in The Fence (UK), BlazeVox issue 17, and is forthcoming in the women: poetry: migration anthology from Theenk publishers, NY (2017). Jennifer currently teaches for the Université de Haute Alsace and will be doing some guest teaching for Kent University UK's Paris MFA program and Naropa University in 2017 and 2018. She also co-organized the international conference Poetry in Expanded Translation 2: Intersemiotic Translation—between text and image, which was held in Mulhouse.

The Academy of American Poets posting about this event is at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/event/presenting-american-poets-paris-jennifer-k-dick