Versatorium:

Translation as social project — Austria and elsewhere

Julie Carr

Neuberg Train station, Neuberg, Austria — Neuberg Train Station

After the unfathomable swarm that was the Women’s March in D.C., I find it both difficult and necessary to return to thinking about the small, local, intimate actions that are the focus of this series of posts. Necessary because massive gatherings, though exhilerating, are also largely symbolic and affective (unless they actually shut things down), while the actions I am writing about are concrete, direct, and (inter)personal. Difficult because actions both small and slow provoke feelings of panic in a time of such painful crisis.

Nonetheless, with the help of participant Binswanger Friedman, I am returning this week to thinking about Versatorium, a radical writing and education project that shares some qualities with The Public School (in LA and satellite cities throughout the US, Europe, and in Puerto Rico) and Senselab in Montreal. Like those projects, Versatorium seeks to generate non-hierarchical communal spaces for study. Its roots are in poetry and translation; its participants are multilingual and multinational including Europeans, Americans, and refugee writers and their families who now make their homes in Austria.

Sometime in the early aughts, Austrian poet and translator Peter Waterhouse (whose book Language Death, Night Outside I find stunningly beautiful) started teaching a seminar on translation through the University of Vienna. This course was unusual to begin with, as it met (after the first couple of years) in an apartment off campus and was open to anyone (sometimes folks who lived in the building would stop in for a while). Discussions centered around philosophical texts and poetry, especially that of Rosmarie Waldrop, Walter Benjamin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Eventually this unusual hybrid — part graduate course, part community reading group — outgrew its university affiliation, but Waterhouse continued to hold meetings of impassioned translators and poets. The group acquired a new name in 2012, Versatorium, and began to work together on translations.

From the start, translation was thought of as a social, never individual, project. All translations were approached collaboratively, no translation was considered “done.” The process was one of intense (and slow) communal labor.

Shortly after publishing their first full (and prize winning!) works of translation, two volumes of works by Charles Bernstein, Versatorium expanded its activities, creating what it calls Neuberg College — a free and again highly collaborative “school,” housed in an abandoned train station in Neuberg an der Mürz, Austria. The school’s “motto” is “Verein für Übersetzung der Gesellschaft,” which roughly translates as “association for the translation of society.” It takes much of its inspiration from the history of Black Mountain College, and in fact created a series of photographs in which they modeled themselves after Black Mountain participants!

Neurberg College participants model themselves after shots from Black Mountain College.

Courses, or more like lead discussion groups, focus on poetry, philosophy, music, architecture, and other topics, and are held in polyglot fashion. Anyone can choose to present a course and anyone is invited to take it. Last summer, Neuberg College created partnerships with Austrian agencies working with refugees from Syria and Iraq. Newly located families arrived to participate in the various informal and slightly more formal projects of collaborative study. Many of these refugees were themselves writers, poets, and performers, and brought with them not only these knowledges but also their kids, some of whom, after just a few months in Austria, were more or less fluent in German.

This work into an expanded notion of community and learning in a seemingly ever-growing range of languages has led to further multilingual readings and performances, such as the traveling performance of Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen (The Wards), which was developed with and brought to the stage by a group of refugee actors/writers and already existing members of the group.

After the propulsive and repulsive experiences of January 20 and 21 and the ensuing days (only days?), it feels important to return to the slow-going work of those who are, on modest, human-sized scales, building together the worlds they can imagine. After the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-refugee actions announced by the Trump regime, the work of Versatorium vibrates with urgency.

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January 24, 2017

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Over the next three months I’ll be reporting on a series of social projects instigated by poets all over the country and beyond. I’m choosing the word social over political in order to include the micro, intimate, and local projects that might not fall within common understandings of political action. I’m interested in the slide from the private page and screen to the creation of physical spaces, events and happenings that become sites or instances of transformation, no matter how modest.

It can’t go unremarked that I will be writing these posts during the first three months of the Trump presidency. All of the projects I’ll be reporting on, whether they were instigated in recent months or years ago, are responses to such and seek to resist what he and his cabinet of privatizing, climate change denying, anti-immigration, “law and order,” anti-Muslim, white supremacist, post-truth, and anti-choice billionaires promise to deliver.

Rather than worry about the relationship between poetry and politics, a theme that has been written about exhaustively throughout the ages, I hope to expose some of the many ways that poetry carries us into real-life labors. As Amiri Baraka put it, “a new reality is better than a new movie.”

Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013), and the co-editor, with Jeffrey Robinson, of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). A chapbook of prose, “The Silence that Fills the Future,” was recently released as a free pdf from Essay Press:http://www.essaypress.org/ep-19/

Objects from a Borrowed Confession (prose) will be out from Ahsahta press in early 2017. Carr’s co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory is due out from Commune Editions in 2018.

Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow and is an associate professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the English department and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance Ph.D. She regularly collaborates with dance artist K.J. Holmes and is the co-founder of Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery (www.counterpathpress.org).

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.

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