In her recent volume, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism (Iowa UP, 2018), Sarah Dowling puts into motion the term “translingual poetics” to more richly capture the “capacity of languages to interact, influence, and transform one another,” explicitly engaging poetry that “relies upon and produces effects of untranslatability, opacity, and noncomprehension.” The scholarship and poetic work presented by these panelists is in conversation with Dowling’s theoretical approach and its political dimensions. Though this panel is not about translation per se, the multi, trans, and polylingual work these thinkers make and study also engages innovative contemporary translation scholarship (indeed, some of them are at the forefront of contemporary translation theory and practice), animating concepts like “Ultratranslation” (Jen Hofer, JD Pluecker and Antena Aire), the “deformation zone” of translation and “transgressive circulation” (Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson), “extreme translation” (Adriana X. Jacobs), and “translation as an anti-neocolonial mode” (Don Mee Choi).
In keeping with the commitments of the RCWS Creative Writing Forum, this “Innovative Format” Panel proposes to showcase panelists’ interventions in this important topic through a combination of creative and scholarly modes, bringing experience and performance to bear on their theoretical contributions and into the space of the MLA convention. In “Extending Traditions: Lyric & the Inupiaq Language,” Joan Naviyuk Kane will present her own poems in Inupiaq and English. She will discuss how her translingual writing interrupts and extends theories of the lyric while also putting histories of Indigenous art into conversation with language conservation initiatives. In “Singing Strikes (in Plural Languages): Translation and/as Choral Activism,” Jennifer Scappettone will delve into the multilingual history of radical activist movements aimed at forging global solidarity over the long twentieth century to examine the institutionally eclipsed role of poetry and translation as underpinnings of such movements. In one section of her presentation, she will take as case study the relentless translation activity of the Industrial Workers of the World in both the organization's foreign-language chapters and its publications (the Little Red Songbook and other pamphlets). In the second, she will present a multilingual sound piece of her own crafted using augmented reality to summon both the scenes of ghosted telecommunications industry and a chorus of resistance to the extractive capitalism at its heart.
In her presentation, “Talk to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance,” Mónica de la Torre will use her own creative work and Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea to probe the relationship between multilingualism in writing and opacity as a strategy of resistance to standardization and cultural hegemony. Inquiring into the ideas of liminality and borders and membranes, her presentation will incorporate a collaborative performative element with other members of the panel. Finally, in “On Being Asian Latino: Or Writing in Hybrid Languages as Respite,” Moisés Park will mix experience, theory, and creative expression, bringing together his experiences “as an Asian Latino teaching an ‘adopted mother tongue’ to English speakers in the States,” his research into 20th-century Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s injunction to “write in a language that is not the mother tongue,” and his own poetry that questions concepts of “proficiency,” plumbing the intersections between languages and celebrating the hybridity of “Konglish, Spanglish, and Coreañol.”
After a very brief introduction, highlighting questions, connections, and theoretical underpinnings, each of the four presenters will speak and/or perform for 12-14 minutes, leaving more than 15 minutes for an unstructured discussion and questions from the audience.