8 - Translating Cities: Walking and Poetry

Summary

This essay explores translation and co-writing in the context of Metropoetica, a project that began in 2009 with a group of seven women poets and translators from different European cities working collaboratively on walking, writing, translation and performance, partly online and partly through workshops in Krakow and Ljubljana. The first phase of the project, involving Ingmara Balode (Latvia), Julia Fiedorczuk (Poland), Sanna Karlström (Finland), Ana Pepelnik (Slovenia), Sigurbjörg Thrastardottir (Iceland), Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese (Poland) and myself, is complete, although at the time of writing further collaborations and performances are planned. The initial idea for Metropoetica grew out of my Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship in women’s poetry and the city at Bangor University, and was developed with Literature Across Frontiers (a network supported by the European Union Culture Programme), which specialises in translation workshops in which co-translation, often with English as a bridge language, enables the translation of literature between less widely used languages.

I wish to examine the interactions between walking, writing, gender and translation that have arisen during the course of the project, with particular focus on how the process of working collaboratively in this area might constitute a form of knowledge. While translation is often described as a secondary activity to literary creation, it is also associated with areas of knowledge and competence that suggest a different power relationship. The overview of urban space offered by the map may be compared with the professional expertise of the translator, who is traditionally expected to offer a transparent insight into another language and culture. The poet’s explorations of language, meanwhile, in ‘original’ work or creative co-translation, may depend on chance connections and encounters in a performance of language that is more akin to the experience of walking through the city without a map. How relevant are these issues of control and ‘mastery’ to the question of writing and gender?

To answer this question, I will consider various kinds of movement, including nomadism of the kind envisioned by Pierre Joris, who writes: ‘A nomad poetics will cross languages, not just translate, but write in any or all of them.’ Writing across languages changes conceptions of space, particularly as it is experienced through the rhizomatic structures of online communication and contemporary possibilities opened by travel and globalisation.