Duplex translations
“I begin with love, hoping to end there.
I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.”
Jericho Brown's Duplex in translation is the second book in a new series co-produced by Fivehundred Places and V–A–C Press, Moscow, and is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.
Jericho Brown is the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer prize in poetry. He has emerged in the past decade as one of the significant voices in American poetry. A great interview with Jericho can be found here
https://onbeing.org/programs/jericho-brown-small-truths-and-other-surprises/
Duplex is both a poem and a form. The repetition of the second line of each stanza as the first line of the next, makes questions,to question, breaths to breathing and light to light.
I asked several artists, who I imagined could relate/ meditate/ absorb some of Duplex. Denise Ferreire da Silva & Valentine Desederi read the poems Tarot. Christodoulos Panayiotou translated Duplex to the Greek-Cypriot dialect in Greeklish, the use of the latin alphabet. Alix Eynaudi's translation is a movement exercise, and Natasha Ginwala chose an image from the Mugal period. Meanwhile translations to Portugese, Polish, Spanish and Arabic hold surprise and witness to the folding and unfolding of this poem.
Translations are greedy (the need for more) they are a sort of re-mix, a dance, they are true and untrue. The artist's voice has potential for the sort of recklessness of imagination that I am looking for now.