Workshops with Deryn Rees-Jones and Rafał Gawin
- Workshop with poet Deryn Rees-Jones: notions of home,
organised with the support of the Ledbury Poetry Festival,
Museum Resource and Learning Centre, 58 Friars St, Hereford HR4 0AS,
10:00 – 12:00, 3rd April 2017
- Workshop with poet Deryn Rees-Jones: notions of home, language, migration
facilitated by Ricarda Vidal and Manuela Perteghella in collaboration with Simon Coffey,
Europe House, Churchill Room, 32 Smith Square, London SW1P 3EU,
18:00 – 20:00,4th May 2017 - Workshop with poet Rafał Gawin: notions of home,
organised and facilitated by Joanna Kosmalska,
House of Literature Łodź
30 May 2017
Travelling Exhibition and Translation Workshops
Whitstable Biennale
5-10th June 2018
Exhibition: Home on the Move
64a Gallery, 64a Oxford Street, Whitstable
Public Workshop:
led by Ricarda Vidal
Whitstable Library, 5 June 2018, 16:00-18:00
Ledbury Poetry Festival
29 June – 8 July 2018
Exhibition: Home on the Move
Upstairs Gallery at Enchant & Allure Store, 15 New Street, Ledbury HR8 2DX,
School Workshops:
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- two workshops for Year 8 and Year 10 students at Pershore High School, led by Ricarda Vidal and Manuela Perteghella, 3 July 2018
- two workshops for Year 7 students at Whitecross High School, 5 July 2018, led by Ricarda Vidal
Public Workshops:
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- Two workshops with poet & translator Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo,
4 July 2018, 11-12:30 and 14:00-15:30
- Two workshops with poet & translator Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo,
Poetry Reading & Roundtable:
With the poets Deryn Rees-Jones and Rafał Gawin and translator Anna Hyde, chaired by Ricarda Vidal and Manuela Perteghella, 4 July 2018
National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London:
26 July – 23rd September 2018
part of the exhibition Language Shift,
Exhibition: Home on the Move
Opening Night: 26 July, 20:00 - 21:30
Multilingual poetry performance with almost all poets and translators and a talk by Ricarda Vidal & Manuela Perteghella
Tate Exchange: Tate Modern
12:00-18:00, 23 May 2019
Pop-up exhibition: Home on the Move
Talk: Ricarda Vidal and Manuela Perteghella in conversation with artist Kate McMillan
Notions of “home” in Europe are becoming more fluid, being challenged and reshaped by unprecedented migration. Our collaborative project Talking Transformations: Home on the Move explored the impact of migration on these notions by employing creative writing, creative translation, intersemiotic translation into film-art and public workshops.
We commissioned the poets Deryn Rees-Jones and Rafał Gawin to each lead public workshops in their home country (respectively Britain and Poland) to explore the themes of home and migration and to then compose a poem.
Deryn's poem was then sent to France and Spain and back to Britain. Rafał's went from Poland to Romania and the UK before returning home. At each point in the journey the poems were translated by a literary translator and by an artist making a film.
As the project was concived as a response to the Brexit referendum, our poems travelled to and from the EU countries that were most important to migration into and out of the UK — for migration to the UK, Romania and Poland; for migration from the UK, France and Spain.
By the time the poems had returned to their language of origin, they had transformed and grown, becoming enriched with the readings and interpretations of their literary and artistic translators. Ricarda and Manuela each made various translations of the each of the poems taking into account all the different versions. We have included Ricarda's multilingual translation of Deryn's poem and Manuela's Italian translation of Rafał's poem here.
The results of the poetic journeys were exhibited in the UK (Whitstable Biennale, Ledbury Poetry Festival, the National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre London, Tate Exchange London) and abroad (Den Haag, Hong Kong) in 2018 and 2019, where new translations into new languages and art forms were created during workshops in libraries, schools and exhibition spaces. As workshop participants came from all walks of life and corners of the world, the project expanded beyond the initial languages, beyond the page and beyond the screen as the poems travelled into Kurdish, Chinese, Catalan, etc, into performance, drawing, dance or music.
The use of “translation” as the underpinning framework for our project stems from its critical relevance to “motion”: as practice, translation signifies the process whereby texts move across borders between cultural, geographical and temporal spaces.
In this online exhibition we present the poems and the transformations they have undergone on their journeys through different languages and artforms.
Please scroll through, click the speaker symbols to listen to the poets and translators reciting their work and watch the 7 art films.
We hope you'll feel inspired and might even want to make your own translations.
To find out more about the theoretical underpinnings of the project, please read our article "Translation as Movement: Migration and Notions of 'Home'" in Open Cultural Studies, in which we discuss the changing notions of home within the framework of the project and present how the discursive and public-facing nature of the project can contribute to a more positive and inclusive debate of migration and its impact on identity and culture.
See below for our poetry anthology Home on the Move: Two Poems Go on a Journey.
Talking Transformations: Home on the Move
curated by Manuela Perteghella and Ricarda Vidal
the online exhibition was put together by Ricarda Vidal
funded by Arts Council England
'One of the most inventive and necessary poetry projects of recent years, a reminder of Ted Hughes's assertion that poetry "is a universal language in which we can all hope to meet"' - Chris McCabe
In 2019, Parthian Press published an anthology of the project, which contains the original poems and translations as well as a selection of retranslations made during the workshops.
You can buy a copy of the book here.
Deryn Rees-Jones held two creative writing workshop on notions of home, one in Herefordshire and the other one in London. The second workshop was addressed specifically at people with a migrant background.
The photograph shows a collage of some of the texts which were created by workshop participants.
The voices of participants from both workshops are reflected in the poem Deryn wrote for "Home on the Move".
Da/heim - Heimat
translation of all versions into German with Spanish, French, English and birdsong by Ricarda Vidal
Translator's comment:
This translation is an attempt to accommodate all the different versions of Deryn's poem, channelled through my own readings and interpretations. The resulting poem is a dialogue between a close translation into German, which was above all informed by the different literary translations, and translations of the films into French, Spanish and English.
In my recording of the poem I deliberately included the calls and tweets of garden birds making homes in trees and bushes outside my window. I wanted to situate this multilingual poem in the typical soundscape of an English garden in spring. After all, it was first conceived in spring and it was spring again when I made my translation a year later.
In addition to her linguistic translation, Elise Aru also made a textile translation of "Home", for which she used Deryn's poem, her own and Timothy Mathews' literary translations, weaving and stitching a delicate patchwork home from the three voices.
La casa, una struttura en traduzione
translation of the English
versions and based on the experience of the Polish and Romanian as well as the film versions into Italian by Manuela Perteghella
Please scroll further East (right) to listen to reflections by some of the translators involved in the project and to read the biographies of all collaborators.
Rafał Gawin led a creative writing workshop about notions of home at Łodž House of Literature. The conversations with participants and the poems they created during the workshop fed into the poem Rafał wrote for "Home on the Move".
The workshop was facilitated by Joanna Kosmalska. To listen to Joanna's reflections on her involvelment with the project, please scroll right.
The image shows a concertina book full of poems which were created by participants of the translation workshops we led as part of the travelling exhibition. A selection of these poems is included in our anthology Home on the Move. Amongst these is Margaret Adkins' "Home", which you can also listen to here.
Margaret's version is based on a Catalan translation by Noèlia Díaz Vicedo of Deryn's "Home", which was the basis of a workshop Noèlia led during the exhibition at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Margaret does not speak Catalan and her translation is not a close literary translation of Noèlia's version. Rather, it approaches Deryn's original poem through the journey it has undertaken, emulating the sounds of the different languages (including but not restricted to Catalan), playing with "mis-translations" and creating new images which sometimes mirror, sometimes repeat and sometimes depart from those present in the original poem. What is being translated here is a feeling, an atmosphere, a sensual response.
Poets, Translators and Artists
Biographies
Teodor Ajder is a psychologist, special educator, writer, curator, immigrant. A graduate in Psychology from Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania, he obtained his PhD in Media, Information and Environmental Sciences from Yokohama National University. Currently he is non-affiliated academically. He is the author of a number of books in which the topic of migration is prevalent – MO[PO]JARO (2010); The Mēn Mask is For A Japanese Girl (2008); Vurda, The Heart’s Replacement (2003). In 2014, he co- founded a trilingual migrant magazine Mămăliga de Varșovia – Warsaw’s Maize Porridge.
Elise Aru is a French artist living in Paris. Previously, she lived in Norwich and London. In her practice, she translates poetry into poem-objects based on the reinvigoration and the displacement of Surrealist practices such as collage. She has been taking part in the meetings of the Paris Surrealist group since 2013. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, Canada, Costa Rica, Spain and France. Her poem-objects can be found at www.elisearu.com.
Heather Connelly & Belén Cerezo
Cerezo and Connelly met during a walk for PhD researchers in Derbyshire, and hoped that one day they would work together. This project has provided the impetus for them to examine the synergies in their practices in text, sound, image, performativity and translation.
Belén Cerezo is an artist, researcher and lecturer based in Nottingham. Her artistic practice explores memory and the interplay between place and culture and takes the form of audiovisual-installations, videos, photographs, writing and performance-lectures. In 2015 Belén Cerezo completed the practice-led PhD ‘What is it ‘to move’ a photograph? Artistic practices for destabilising and transforming images’ at Nottingham Trent University, where she now works as an associate lecturer in Photography. Recent publications include ‘How to Open my Eyes? The performance-lecture as a method within artistic research’ in Networking Knowledge, Vol. 9, No 3 (2016). In 2016 she was a resident artist at Bilbaoarte Foundation. In 2015 she developed the project ‘Rehearsing Memory, Belton 2015’, commissioned by the National Trust, in collaboration with Rebecca Lee. In 2015 she showed her artistic research in the exhibition ‘Moving Stills’, Primary, where she is resident artist since 2012. She is a member of ‘Film Free and Easy’. http://www.belencerezo.com
Heather Connelly is an artist/researcher based in Nottingham. Her art practice/research concerns art-and-translation and linguistic hospitality and is particularly interested in how art practice can be used to examine the performativity of translation and engage people in the complex issues of translation, language learning and, more broadly, transcultural communication. During an AHRC Cultural Engagement fellowship (2016) she established Translation Zone(s) a programme of events and artworks to interrogate these issues. She is also co-founder of InDialogue (2011), an independent biannual symposium (2012, 14 & 16) that interrogates dialogic practices through papers, performances and exhibitions. Most recently she has been writing polylingual scripts and scores with translators and multilingual speakers to be performed in public spaces, conferences and other events. Heather has a long history of working in the arts, exhibiting, leading and developing and delivering independent and strategic arts projects in the public realm in the UK and USA. She is currently Research Fellow at Birmingham City University (BCU), Senior fellow of the Higher Education Authority (UK), holds a PhD by Fine Art Practice (Loughborough University) and an MA Fine Art (Sheffield Hallam University). http://www.heatherconnelly.co.uk/translationzones/ http://www.indialogue.uk.com
Noèlia Díaz Vicedo is a poet, academic and translator. She combines teaching (Queen Mary , University of London, University of Westminster) with research on contemporary women’s poetry and gender studies. She has also co-edited, along with Sandra D. Roig, the poetic anthology Donzelles de l’any 2000, antologia de dones poetes dels Països Catalans (Editorial Mediterrània, 2014). As a translator, she has published the book The Body’s Reason (Francis Boutle Publishers, 2014) by Maria- Mercè Marçal from Catalan and poems by several authors included in the magazine Alba Londres. Culture in Translation where she was a co-editor (2011-2015). She is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the Institute of Modern Languages, University of London. Her collection of poems Bloody Roots in bilingual edition (Catalan- English) was published by Francis Boutle Publishers in 2018. She has performed her poetry around the UK and Spain. http://noeliadiazvicedo.blogspot.co.uk
Marta Dziurosz is a Polish-English literary translator and interpreter, curator, and Free Word Centre’s Translator in Residence 2015-2016. She also works for Pan Macmillan and is a Free Word Centre Associate. Her writing and translations have been published by the New Statesman, PEN Atlas, New Books from Poland, For Books’ Sake, Asymptote, and elsewhere. martadziurosz.com @martadziurosz
Rafał Gawin is a Polish poet, critic, proofreader, editor of the quarterly journal of poetry and literary arts Arterie, conferencier and art manager. He has published two collections of poetry, Wycieczki osobiste / Code of Change (London/Gniezno, 2011; translated by Marek Kazmierski) and Zachód słońca w Kurwidołach (Łódź, 2016) and the booklet Przymiarki (Wroclaw, 2009). His poems have been translated into Bulgarian, English, German, Russian, Ukrainian and French. He has been published in numerous newspapers (including Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik Łódzki, Wyspa), journals (Odra, Tygiel Kultury, Opcje, Kresy, Fraza, and the like) and anthologies (e.g. Na grani, Połów. Debuted in 2010, Anthologia2# and Ani ziemia jałowa, ani obiecana. Antologia łódzkich pisarzy / Weder wüstes Land noch gelobtes. Junge Literatur aus Lodz). He has also won various literary awards, including the T. J. Sulkowski Prize. He lives in Lodz where he works as a cultural programme coordinator for Dom Literatury. He writes a blog: gawin.liberte.pl.
Anna Hyde (Anna Błasiak) studied Art History in Warsaw, Film Studies in Kraków and Arts Policy and Management in London. She has translated over 40 books from English into Polish and some fiction from Polish into English (by M.Czubaj, W.Grzegorzewska, J.Krasnowolski. K.Malanowska, D.Odija, A.Augustyniak, M.Szychowiak and I.Amiel). She has also translated poetry into Polish (by M.Jastrzębska, M.O’Donnell, N.O’Mahony, Vesna Goldsworthy and Martina Evans) and into English (by M.Szychowiak and R.Wiśniewski). Anna has worked in museums and a radio station, run magazines, and written on art, film and theatre. She helps run European Literature Network and is one of the editors of Babiniec Literacki, a website publishing poetry written by women. She writes poetry in Polish and English. More at annablasiak.com.
Zuzanna Janin is a visual artist. Born in 1961, she lives and works in Warsaw. She makes sculptures, installations, videos, photography, actions and performatives. She studied at the Academy of Fine Art Warsaw, ÉCAV – École Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre (new media) scholarship, Pro Helvetia, and obtained a PhD in Visual Art in 2016. She took part in Sydney Biennial 1992, Istanbul Biennial 1992, Soonsbeek’93, Liverpool Biennial 1996, Łódź Biennale 2010, Venice Biennale 2011 (in the programme of representation of Romania). Selected solo shows and screenings include Kunstverein Salzburg, Salzburg; Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; Zachęta National Gallery, Warszawa; Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Center for Contemporary Art, Łaźnia, Gdańsk; Kunsthalle Wien Project Space; Sculpture Museum at Królikarnia / National Museum, Warsaw; National Museum, Cracow, Gallery lokal_30, Warszawa; ASAB Bogotá / Colombia; MAM Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro, Galeria Arsenał, Lublin. http://culture.pl/en/artist/zuzanna-janin
Jozefina Komporaly is a London-based translator and academic working on cultural exchanges between Anglophone and European literary traditions. Her translations from Romanian and Hungarian into English appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Exchanges, Index on Censorship, Trafika Europe and she has published extensively on translation and adaptation for the stage, European and British theatre and women’s writing, including the study Staging Motherhood (Palgrave, 2006). Jo is editor and co-translator of the first English-language anthology of Matéi Visniec’s plays, How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (Seagull Books, 2015) and of the critical anthology András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy: Memories of the Body (Intellect, 2017). She is currently finalizing the monograph Radical Revival as Adaptation for Palgrave, and is working on the translation of a Romanian absurdist novel and a string of Hungarian children’s stories. http://www.wordservice.uk
Joanna Kosmalska is a translator, author of articles on contemporary literature, co-editor of “DeKadentzya” literary journal, and research-and-teaching fellow in the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Lodz where she teaches courses in translation (literary, film, interpreting, etc.). She has, among many other things, co-translated, with Mikołaj Deckert, the film script for Jacek Bławut’s “The Day of Chocolate” which won the ScripTeast Award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. In 2011-2015, she ran an international research project on “Polish (E)migration Literature in Ireland and Great Britain since 2004” (http://archiwum-emigracja.uni.lodz.pl/en/). Financed by the National Science Centre, the project focused on poetry, prose and drama writings that tackled the issue of migrations. The overall aim was to trace how the post-EU-accession migrations of Polish people to Britain and Ireland had influenced contemporary literature and culture and to highlight the functions the new transnational literature and culture had performed in Polish, British and Irish societies. For her engagement in promoting migrant literature, she was awarded Statuetka Pięknych Ludzi by the Polish diaspora authors in the UK.
Benoît Laffiché is a French artist living in Brittany. He has investigated migration and globalisation extensively in his work. ‘Laffiché invents systems and arrangements which are vehicles of an artistic line of thought. His images are perceptible and sensitive, in so much as the work of art, for him, is the outcome of a close understanding of the conditions of existence. Perceptible, because they are a combination of theoretical intuition and poetic intent. Sensitive, because artistic activity is a criticism of everyday life. And sensitive and perceptible because his art conceives of the world as a soothing approach, with a keen eye on details, lesser things, and bridging tactics—attentive to life.’ (Pascal Beausse, 2009) ddab.org/en/oeuvres/LAFFICHE | www.instagram.com/benoitlaffiche/
Domingo Martínez Rosario holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Valencia, Spain. He was awarded a BA in Fine Art from the University of Salamanca in 2006 and a Masters in Artistic Production from the University of Valencia in 2007. He was awarded an Erasmus Scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and has been the recipient of a Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Martínez’s thesis Artwork as counter-monument: representation of the unheroic memory as a resource for contemporary art explores the theory and practice of contemporary art through the lens of cultural memory theory. Martínez is an accomplished artist and has been the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Francisco de Zurbarán award (Junta de Extremadura, 2008). He had held a residency at the Antonio Gala Foundation for Young Artists (Córdoba, 2007) and participated in Living Art Terra IV Sanxenxo (Pontevedra, 2006). As a practitioner and academic, Martínez often crosses boundaries in his work, uniting theory with practice. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Spain and the UK. Besides his art practice, he teaches at Universidad Nebrija in Madrid.
Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at University College London. He has written widely about 20th and 21st century French Literature, comparative literature and comparative approaches. His research interests include translation, literary theory, creative critical writing, French poetry from Baudelaire to the present, avant-garde aesthetics, relations of literature and visual art. He has published on Guillaume Apollinaire, Aimé Césaire, Roland Barthes, Michel Houellebecq, W G Sebald, Cees Noteboom, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Giacometti, Agnès Thurnauer, Antoni Tàpies. His most recent book, Alberto Giacometti: the Art of Relation (2013) explores what relating to art can tell us about relating to others. He is co-translator with Delphine Grass of Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle (2010), and co-editor with Jan Parker of Tradition, Translation, Trauma (2011). He is currently writing a book of short critical chronicles, while also preparing translations of Guillaume Apollinaire and Gérard Macé. Timothy Mathews is a member of the Academy of Europe and Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Kate McMillan’s work incorporates a range of media including sculpture, film, sound, installation and photography. McMillan is interested in the linking narratives of forgetting and place, often focusing on the residue of the past. Her artworks thus act as haunting memory-triggers for histories and ideas that are over- looked. Her most recent solo exhibition at Castor Projects in London in 2016 was titled Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dying and mapped the relationship between inherited body memory and landscape, incorporating film, sculpture and photographs. www.katemcmillan.net/
Manuela Perteghella is a writer, curator, and creative producer. As an academic, she has published research in the field of literary translation, promoting translation as a highly creative practice. She has taught translation at universities in the UK, more recently for the Open University, and worked for theatre companies in the past. She is the co-curator of ‘TransARTation!’ (2017), a touring and virtual exhibition of inter-art and cross-media translations. http://transartation.co.uk/
Ghenadie Popescu (born in 1971, in Floresti) lives and works in Chisinau. An acute and ironic observer, his practice reflects on today’s society, in which the individual renounces his/her self and totally merges with work. However, this does not ensure the individual with a state of well-being, leaving him/her poor, not only materially, but also spiritually. Popescu uses consecrated symbols of his native region – mamaliga (maize hardboiled porridge), the country’s national flag – Tricolor, the wheelbarrow – but also newer symbols that overtook the Moldovan material culture, such as the famous raffia squared bags. He loves travelling, both on the ground and with his mind. He has created paintings, sculpture, objects, art-books. He is the author of countless performances, many of them in the public space, in which the public has an important and interactive role to play. He is also a book illustrator. Most recently he is focusing on stop motion animation. He has held several art residences and his works have been shown in galleries and museums in Europe and the USA.
Deryn Rees-Jones is a poet and critic. She is the editor of Pavilion Poetry and teaches at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing. What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems was published in 2016. derynrees-jones.co.uk
Silvia Terrón is a Spanish poet, translator and journalist. She’s the editor of poetry publisher La Cama Sol and editor-in-chief of the bilingual (Spanish-French) literary magazine Alba Paris, which is devoted to the dissemination of literature from Spain and Latin America in France. She coordinates the Literature programme of Spain Now! an annual season of Spanish Contemporary culture in London. Silvia has published three poetry books: La imposibilidad gravitatoria, (Ediciones Torremozas, 2009), Doblez (Ediciones Liliputienses, 2014) and Las Veces (La Isla de Siltolá, 2015). Of her poetry, it has been said that her verses lead the reader to ‘an incognito territory that we do not want to give up exploring’. http://www.silviaterron.com/
Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, translator and curator. She teaches at King’s College London and is the founder of Translation Games, a research project exploring the theory and practice of intersemiotic and multilingual translation. Her most recent book, Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (co-edited with Madeleine Campbell) was published with Palgrave in January 2019. She is also co-curator of the artist book series Revolve:R (2013, 2015, 2018) which charts the creative correspondence of twenty-four international artists, poets, filmmakers and musicians. She leads the Experiential Translation Network. https://experientialtranslation.net/
Sally Waterman creates autobiographical photographic and video works that explore memory, place and familial relationships. She received her PhD in Media and Photography: ‘Visualising The Waste Land: Discovering a Praxis of Adaptation’ from the University of Plymouth in 2011. She has exhibited and screened her work extensively since 1996, including Wolverhampton Art Gallery, UK; Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales, UK; Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery, London, UK; Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany; ViSiONA festival, Huesca, Spain and the Berlin Experimental Film Festival, Germany. Her work is held in public and private collections including King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvar, Hungary, The National Art Library at the V&A, London, UK and the Yale Center for British Art, New York, USA. She is a founder member of the research group, Family Ties Network and is currently a sessional lecturer at Ravensbourne, London. www.sallywaterman.com