Event Type
Julie Carr, Ghazal Mosadeq and Daniel Borzutky will present recent experiments in translation. For Julie Carr’s project she invited seven people to translate a poem from her forthcoming book, Turning, into seven languages relevant to the poem’s content. These languages are movement, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Spanish, and sound. The multi-lingual and multi-vocal poem—which addresses chemical warfare in Nazi occupied Ukraine (where members of Carr’s family originate) and in present-day Gaza—is presented as a video and audio performance. Ghazal Mosadeq will read from her translation of Iranian born poet Mehdi Akhavan-Saless's long poem, Then After Thunder, in which she emphasized the spare and grounded language that was shaped through his lived opposition to foreign intervention and repeated imprisonment. This translation draws attention to Akhavan-Saless's resistance to embellishment as a function of his antagonism with colonial and imperial forces. Daniel Borzutzky's creative/critical hybrid presentation will illustrate examples of how his work has evolved through translational catastrophes and through catastrophes of translation. He'll discuss translations and writing projects he's worked on, and the ways in which they have come together through a response-based poetics that is 'inscribed' into the body as it moves between languages and temporalities.