Stéphane Mallarmé's The Conversation

Stéphane Mallarmé's “Demon of Analogy” is a prose poem about demonic nature of mishearing. Francis Ford Coppola's “The Conversation” is about the demonic technologies that allow us to hear all-too-well. Joe Milutis' “Stéphane Mallarmé's 'The Conversation,'” with little to no editing mashes up these classic texts, to suggest that one may be a mishearing (or spooky translation) of the other. In addition, the original text of the Mallarmé poem is translated by way of a number of bending techniques that, while getting back to the original sound and meaning of the French, bend, distort and remix the original. This project is part of a larger scholarly and creative exploration of experimental translation as an extension of remix and appropriation practices. A number of chapbooks, videos, lectures and performances have emerged from this project, including Monkey pOm! (a translation of Hanuman Chalisa), Mao Vincit Omnia (a translation of Mao's Little Red Book), The Numbers (a translation of a German translation of Robert Creeley's number poems), and Twenty Beloved French Poems, Treated Poorly (a translation of 19th-century French poetry, of which “Stéphane Mallarmé's 'The Conversation'” is a part). (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)