When a translator pushes an original lyric or narrative text into the territory of sound experiment, activism, or time-travelling polyphonic conversation—is that still ‘translation’? What happens when the translator merges with the speaker or author of the original so that one or the other becomes a ‘mouthpiece’ (as Caroline Bergvall has it in Alisoun Sings) or a single shared voice as in James Womack’s Homunculus? What are the ways we might ethically ‘colonize’ an original text in the interest of conceptual experiment, ventriloquism or political engagement? This event brings together four poet-linguists who will talk about their current or recent projects in the context of these questions.

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Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, whose work has been presented in 16 countries. Her work centres disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. She is currently Researcher-in-Residence and Research Fellow at UAL's Decolonising Arts Institute, and Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK). Among her honours, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation's Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See for her work in her Annah, Infinite series, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. Her books are Rope (Nine Arches) and Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), and she is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches). Her next book is poetry collection Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches, March 2021).

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet, writer, sound artist and performer with an interdisciplinary practice, working across artforms, media and languages all over the world. Her works include books, performances, sound installations and print. Her current book Alisoun Sings (2019) is the final volume of a trilogy exploring medieval and contemporary languages and source materials. It includes Meddle English (2011) and Drift (2014, awarded a Cholmondeley Award 2017). Her outdoor sunrise performance Ragadawn (2016-18) is part of a current vocal performance cycle, based on conversations around ancient and minorised languages. It has travelled around Europe and the UK.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her most recent translations are Maria Stepanova’s prose work In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo, 2021) and Stepanova’s poetry War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe, 2021). She has published five collections of poetry. Deformations (Carcanet, 2020) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation at university, and received his doctorate, on W.H. Auden's translations, in 2006. He lived in Madrid from 2008 to 2017, and now teaches Spanish and translation at Cambridge University. He is a freelance translator from Russian and Spanish, and helps run Calque Press, which concentrates on poetry, translation and the environment. His debut collection of poems, Misprint, was published by Carcanet in 2012, and On Trust: A Book of Lies came out in 2017.

Kathryn Maris, author of The House with Only an Attic and a Basement (2018), is a PhD researcher at Durham University.

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We will close the evening by inviting an audience discussion with our panelists.