Lines of Flight

Madhu H. Kaza

CRITICISM, ESSAY, POETICS, TRANSLATION STUDIES  | $14

May 2024

Taking a turn from the poetics of Édouard Glissant into the realm of flowers, mountains, and history, Madhu H. Kaza’s essay wanders through a landscape of translation shaped by delight in error. Lines of Flight follows echoes and associative logics across cultures and eras, from Ancient Greece to thirteenth-century Japan to sixteenth-century Mexico to our own time, in an attempt to unfix translation and dwell in the ongoingness of language.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s Sentimental Ed series. Sentimental Ed publishes theoretical texts (including scholarly and research-based work) that enact their arguments through the poetics of text, the materialities of book design, and other experimental forms of theory-in-practice. In solidarity with scholars and thinkers that resist demands for objectivity and views-from-nowhere, this series offers a space for experimental scholarship that is rigorous, speculative, intersectional, playful, personal and relational. 

About the Author

Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist, and educator based in New York. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that connects migration to translation, and which features diasporic and BIPOC translators. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative where she served most recently as Assistant Dean of the Microcollege. She teaches in the MFA Writing program at Columbia University.

Praise

In exquisite prose, Kaza turns translation against time, dispelling the myth that meaning originates in one language to be carried directly into another. Weaving everyday observations and literary history, Kaza’s poetic contemplations push thinking to an edge where—before breaking down—language swerves and takes flight. “Everything can be transformed into something else” also allows the canon to finally be released from authority. Homer becomes a trace and Ovid a wave, which doesn’t mean that history isn’t brutal, but that when decoupled from a humanist ethos, to translate is to become coterminous with the world, to “write in flowers.” I rejoice in each of Kaza’s choices, in her choice to not choose, to let errors guide us towards an ethics of multitude.

Mirene Arsanios

Sublime, elegant, serious. To read Madhu Kaza’s Lines of Flight is to step out onto a smoldering rope suspended between history and reality. Each word here is a new step toward a clearer, yet unraveling world—where language is both the ground and the air. Valiant, rigorous—tender—Lines of Flight excavates that poignant crossroad where exile, desire and the self finally reunite—unencumbered—each an ardent dynamic of the same ever-shifting being. But in Kaza’s diligent hands, this often coined instability is a site of profound, rare daring.

Robin Coste Lewis

The world is full of mountains and monuments. I take a walk with Madhu H. Kaza. Blue or green mountains walk with us, take flight. The flight path moves through Ovid, the Florentine Codex, Alice Oswald, Joan of Arc: et cetera, et cetera, like a song. Above all, Kaza’s Lines of Flight leaves me with a curiously light sensation of ongoingness as a “coming and going and transforming.” A line of flight upon which my heart takes a leap. It takes the edges of translation alterity and transforms them into an expansive, generous mode of thinking about, living with, and making art.

Sawako Nakayasu

Links

The Subject of Pain: On Louise Bourgeois by Madhu H. Kaza

A Panel on the Politics of Translation with YZ Chin, Madhu Kaza, Emma Ramadan, and David Unger

Translating the Uncertain Present with Madhu Kaza and Lina Mounzer on Tuesday 19 May 2020

EDITOR’S NOTE: KITCHEN TABLE TRANSLATION

Unamed Dead

 How Do You Want to Be Wrong?: Talking with Madhu H. Kaza

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-31-6
Pamphlet
Saddle-stitched. 56 pp, 5.25 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: May 01 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Sentimental Ed #1