[virtual]

If Lines Are Light Rays: Virtual translation workshop with Mónica de la Torre
April 4, 2020, 2:00 pm
at Woodland Pattern Book Center

Woodland Pattern is hosting this virtual translation workshop with UDP author, translator, and editor Mónica de la Torre.

Picture a prism refracting a ray of light and making rainbows. Once it was thought that white light was colorless and that prisms produced the colors they emitted. Later Newton demonstrated that all colors already existed in the light, and that prisms fanned colors out because particles of varying hues traveled through them at different speeds. Now imagine that a line of poetry is a ray of light, and that a prism is a translation machine of sorts. You might say something in English, but when you refract it through the prism, a Chinese speaker might pick up on phonemes that mean something else, which in turn differs from what speakers of Arabic, Polish, Spanish, or any other language might be able to make out from your original utterance. With this in mind, in this workshop we will generate poetry by experimenting with multidirectional translation. Monolinguals and those fluent in languages other than English are invited to collaborate and engage in reciprocal translation experiments, creative mishearing, homophonic and homographic translation as a way to generate poems that make the most of our diverse linguistic backgrounds. Poetry, indeed, will be made by all! (As Lautréamont would have it.) Proficiency in English decidedly not necessary!

Mónica de la Torre works with and between languages. Her latest book, The Happy End/All Welcome, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, which also put out her translation of Defense of the Idol by Chilean modernist Omar Cáceres in 2018. Recent writing appears in Artforum, A Public Space, The Literary Review, and Folder. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College. Repetition Nineteen, a new book of poems, is forthcoming from Nightboat in 2020.

 

This workshop session will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access when they register for the workshop.

2—5 PM CDT | $35 General — $30 Member | Scholarships available.

To purchase a General Ticket follow this PayPal link. To purchase a Member Ticket follow this PayPal link.

We are offering a limited number of scholarships to this workshop for those in need. Please apply at this link.

More info on the class here.