J2 editor Julia Bloch reviews three poetry titles on earthly and bodily reorganization: Orogeny by Iréne Mathieu, The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky, and Community Garden for Lonely Girls by Christine Shan Shan Hou.
J2 editor Julia Bloch reviews three poetry titles on earthly and bodily reorganization.
Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, Blaffer Museum. Photo courtesy of Antena/Madsen Minax.
The Intermedium series concludes with my conversation with Antena, the collaborative created by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker. As individuals Hofer and Pluecker have carried out extensive projects in translation and poetics. United as Antena, they create manifestos and how-to guides regarding translation, among many other thought-provoking interventions. As the conversation demonstrates, Hofer and Pluecker have reflected extensively on values and practices associated with literary translation while pursuing experiment. In the context of a poetics magazine, the Antena project merits special attention for another whole zone of exploration: it advances conversations and events to highlight specific complexities of interpretation (spoken and signed), with special attention to language justice.
Writertranslators Omar Pérez (L) and Daniel Borzutzky (R), 2014. KDykstra.
Translator as fulcrum: a point central or essential to an activity, an event, a situation. Clearly the model applies to any bilingual reading that depends on a translator to quarterback the event for an audience with limited or no ability to understand the writer’s original language.
However, this entry takes the notion of the fulcrum differently. Daniel Borzutzky has been developing a fulcrum poetics, one located among the activities & events & situations where poetry and translation balance off, moving against and with each other.
After taking a bit of a hiatus from this column over the holidays, my encounter with this essay by Daniel Borzutsky, a Chicago-based poet and translator, has coaxed me back to work. Before reading the essay (I’m embarrassed to admit), I didn’t know Borzutsky’s work well, although I had read some excerpts and his statement of poetics in the wonderful new Counterpath anthology Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing.
I was first attracted to Borzutzky’s essay because it opens with an incredible quote by Don Mee Choi, a friend of mine who is herself a poet and translator.
Upheaval and return
Julia Bloch
J2 editor Julia Bloch reviews three poetry titles on earthly and bodily reorganization: Orogeny by Iréne Mathieu, The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky, and Community Garden for Lonely Girls by Christine Shan Shan Hou.
J2 editor Julia Bloch reviews three poetry titles on earthly and bodily reorganization.