THIS WORKSHOP IS EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS OF THE WRITING SQUAD.

An exciting double bill of translation workshops (no second language necessary!) run by Shash Trevett and Tayiba Sulaiman.

ALLOWING THE WORDS TO FLOW WITH SHASH

Don Mee Choi has written about the ‘impossible connections’ she makes between Korean and English. In this workshop, we will look at how to achieve these impossible connections.

We will look at the interplay between words and their meanings: their willingness to bend and shift towards other words, their completeness. We will examine how a translator enters a poem, looks at the bonds which tie words together and unloosens them to carry them over to a new language. We will look at how a translator is a ferryman, a bridge builder, a path maker of words.

By examining translations of the same poem by different translators we will look at what makes a good translation, examining concepts of ‘fidelity’ in translation and the notion of the ‘invisible’ translator. We will look at the nuts and bolts of translating poetry: what makes a good translation, how do you choose what needs to be included and what discarded, how to make your translations sing their own songs.

SHAKE THE BOTTLE: TRANSLATION GAMES TO MAKE YOUR WRITING FIZZ WITH TAYIBA

What happens to a piece of writing if you think like a translator, shake it up and let it bubble out into a new form?

Ever gotten stuck on a poem or a story and felt like you have no idea how to change it to make it feel fresh? In this workshop, we’ll use the idea of translation to find ways of making the old feel new and the familiar feel strange. By using movement between different languages as a model to think about editing, change, double meanings and mistakes, this workshop will offer you a tool-kit for taking the words you’ve almost given up on and start playing with them again.

Some Light Reading

(please dip into some or all of these)

Sophie Collins ‘Erasing the signs of labour under the signs of happiness: ‘joy’ and ‘fidelity’ as bromides of literary translation.

The Poetry Review 108:2 (Summer 2018)

https://poetrysociety.org.uk/erasing-the-signs-of-labour/

Lawrence Venuti The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge revised 2018)

Chapter 1: Invisibility (this is an academic text and not exactly an ‘easy’ read, so please dip into Chapter 1 only, if you’d like to)

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Translator_s_Invisibility/xW5ADwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT7&printsec=frontcover

Video: Translation Slam from American PEN World Voices 2020

with Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil and translators Joshua Freeman & Mutallip Anwar.

https://youtu.be/jdNskowaWa8?si=q5NaQTBWx7tr_O8a

Shash Trevett is a poet, critic and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies (including POETRY, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Harvard Review and The North), she has read variously across the U.K and internationally and is a winner of a Northern Writers’ Award. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (Bloodaxe 2023, Penguin India 2023) which she co-edited with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne, was one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2023. Her collection The Naming of Names, was published by Smith|Doorstop in September 2024 and her translations are studied as part of the Cambridge IGCSE, Cambridge International O Level and AS & A Level English syllabus. An experienced workshop leader, Shash has presented on translation at academic conferences both in the U.K and abroad, has been involved with the Singapore Translation Symposium, the PEN Translates, and the PEN Presents awards, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and has been a mentor for both New Writing North and the National Centre for Writing. She is a Ledbury Critic and a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Tayiba is a writer and translator from Manchester. She graduated with a degree in English and Modern Languages in 2023, and completed an Emerging Translators Mentorship with the translator Jamie Lee Searle in 2024. Her recent translations from German include the writings of a Viennese family who fled the Holocaust in 1938, poetry by Swiss-Croatian writer Dragica Rajčić Holzner and a verse script for the 2024 Droste Festival at the Centre for Literature, Burg Hülshoff. Her own writing has appeared in Prospect Magazine, PEN Transmissions and World of Interiors. She has recently completed a project responding to three major archival collections in Manchester: the North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collection, and the Manchester Poetry Library. She works at Profile Books.

Allowing the Words to Flow: the Nuts and Bolts of Translating Poetry