Ours Lingages

21/07 2017 10.15 PM Performance Ours Lingages
Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto.
during the Electronic Literature Organisation conference ELO 2017
Annie Abrahams featured artist
invited by Rui Torres and Sandy Baldwin

Performance in collaboration with Daniel Pinheiro, Isabel Costa, Igor Stromajer, Outranspo (Lily Robert-Foley, Camille Bloomfield, Jonathan Baillehache), Jan de Weille, Rui Torres, Helen Varley Jamieson,  Anna Tolkacheva and the readingclub.

Ours Lingages = a script – online poetry, language learning tools and collective writing + code + voice + dance + text + singing and a blindfold – unrehearsed.

You are welcome online for the associated session of the readingclub, where Helen is expecting you. Duration 30 min. For the complete performance you will have to be in Porto.

Ours Lingages. The internet is my language mother. I speak with a voice that’s not my own, I speak in other voices, not my voice. We are all e-strangers, all nomads that use globish bastard languages. We are the alienated translated (wo)men in-between code and emotion, in-between our wish to be visible and our longing for intimacy. L’entre-deux = void. Can’t we be “with” instead?
Translation is a joy as long as you can accept the imperfections of the result, are willing to learn, to spend time, to pay attention, to take risks and to accept your own incompleteness and glitches. Translation is always failing, faulty, it’s a source for confusion … and discovery. It opens a third language; another in-between, and then a fourth and … Better take nothing for granted and play with it. Be the one not looking at what something is, but at what something can do.
You have to accept (a FEW times). A few times. New language. Let’s try to be “with”.

Documentation – video etc.

Filed under: e-literature, Of interest, Performance, Daniel Pinheiro, Electronic Literature Organisation, ELO 2017, Igor Stromajer, Isabel Costa, multilinguism, outranspo, ReadingClub

writing it twice – painsong

Sara Kippur, Writing It Twice
Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French,
Northwestern University Press,
ISBN 978-0-8101-3205-4

While I was in Germany for unaussprechbarlich, I recieved this book by post, because there is an image of my work in it.

On page 135 there are some lines on the presentation of my work painsong (2004) as an example of presenting translations in dynamic contact with each other. Kippur also describes painsong as a dizzying auditory superposition of languages with a content that figures pain through discordant multilingualism.

I have read the introduction and feel stimulated to dig further.
Chapter 1 bears a motto by Marcel Proust: Great books are written in a kind of foreign language.
“Toward a Model of Collaborative Self-Translation” and “The bilingual call for Autofiction” are some intriguing sub-chapter titles.
I will certainly write some more about it on my e-stanger tumblr when I will have read the rest of the book.

Though the practice of self-translation long predates modernity, it has found new forms of expression in the global literary market of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The international renown of self-translating authors Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, and Vladimir Nabokov has offered motivation to a new generation of writers who actively translate themselves.

Intervening in recent debates in world literature and translation studies, Writing It Twice establishes the prominence and vitality of self-translation in contemporary French literature. Because of its intrinsic connection to multiple literary communities, self-translation prompts a reexamination of the aesthetics and politics of reading across national lines. Kippur argues that self-translated works should be understood as the paradigmatic example of world literature and, as such, crucial for interpreting the dynamics of literary circulation into and out of French.
nupress.northwestern.edu/content/writing-it-twice-0

Filed under: Articles / Texts, book, multilinguism, painsong, Sara Kippur, self-translation, translation, World Literature