Transcreation

Over a year and a half ago, a group of scholars, programmers, artists and translators started working on a research project focusing on the translation of various works of electronic literature, ranging from e-poetry (Maria Mencia’s The Poem That Crossed the Atlantic), digital database (Luís Lucas Pereira’s Machines of Disquiet), installation (Søren Pold et al’s The Poetry Machine), digital aurature (digital language art in programmable aurality) (John Cayley’s The Listeners) and hyperfiction (Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story). In order to identify common and divergent issues depending on the genres, formats and languages of the works under study, they were all examined through the prism of the following concepts: Translinguistic translation (translation between languages), Transcoding (translation between machine-readable codes and between machine-readable codes and human-readable text), Transmedial translation (translation between medial modalities), and Transcreation (translation as a shared creative practice).

 One of the recurring questions raised throughout the project was: how interventionist/creative should our translation/remediation be as we are also touching upon the very materiality of the works? A current theme has been to combine the cybertextual or software dimensions with the textual, semantic dimensions and to discuss translation as much as a translation of processes as the (finished) product of a particular tradition of translinguistic practice. Some of the theoretical terms for this has been the concept of electronic tropes, “radical mediation” (Richard Grusin), and how different languages relate to each other in ways that cannot be revealed. With Walter Benjamin, we could also ask whether translation is “merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other,” including the question of code in our reflection.

 This roundtable will give the members of the project the opportunity to share their observations on their collective endeavors; bridging the gap between the practice-based approach and a theoretical perspective on the task of translating electronic literature. In addition to a brief presentation of each work and the specific challenges they raised, the participants will offer key insights into the collective methodologies elaborated throughout the duration of the project.

Jeneen Naji describes Chris Funkhouser’s Press Again and Sonny Rae Tempest’s Famicommunist Poetics as examples of “the UnderAcademy style” begun by Talan Memmott. At the same time, within the context of post-digital publication, Naji explores concepts like “transcreation” and “translation” insofar as the two digital practitioners have conveyed experimental e-texts into print.

The American poetry critic Marjorie Perloff undertook the task of rendering a solid theoretical framework to understand the evolution of the art of poetry after Modernism. Furthermore, she traced the evolution of “Postmodern” poetry, analyzing the most radical experiments including the digital poetry of the present. Based on Perloff’s perspective, this paper will observe the evolution of translation as part of the poetics of the American poet Ezra Pound and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. Following its transformation as a writing strategy, they understood translation as a process adjacent to poetry, though the incorporation of translation as part of their own work would be observed as unethical for many critics. Therefore, Haroldo de Campos coined the term “Transcreation” in order to refer his translations as an original work. Interestingly enough, the paradigm for this sort of writing is the Irish writer James Joyce, whose controversial piece Finnegans Wake introduced not only linguistic but also metaphorical and historical translation. Since then, translation would set a new style of writing, a style that relies on the verbal materiality and where the understanding of the puns and languages will not be as relevant as the comprehension of the poetics as a project. From this perspective, this paper aims to explore the processes involved in the making of e-poetry, and offering an approach to its translation. Branching from the modernist translation strategies, which were perceived as “radical” in their moment, the challenging questions posited by e-poetry conjure up a new kind of radicality towards translation.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)