Friday, May 28, 2010

I haven't written about anything in a while. I have a couple of projects I've been working on (more or less) for school. One I've been working on in different stages since the winter quarter, I've been transliterating poetry from a languages I don't speak by means of homophonic and visual translation or association to create new poems. So far I've only used a couple of french poets and their styles are pretty similar. The first poet I tried it with was Stephane Mallarmé, he wrote a poem called Un Coup De Des that never got published the way that he intended until almost a hundred years after he died. This is a picture of two of the pages.

Mallarmé used the space between the lines of his poetry to strip the connotational or contextual value away from individual words. I guess a new language could be created that way, if you understood the old word in a new way. He had specific instructions for how he wanted the poem to be printed, the size of the pages, the typeface, the size of the type and the two page format which allows printing into the gutter of the page. Anyway, no one ever printed the poem the way he would have wanted it until 1980. Here's an example of an earlier publication of the poem that ignores a lot of Mallarmé's specifications.
The two pages in this format are actually four pages of the original and the font isn't right. What I ended up doing was re-writing the poem in english using the homophonic and visual transliteration and making the words conform to Mallarmé's spacial specifications so it looks like this 


then I take out the original french to have an interpretation of the poem that, while not being a true to language translation, comes a lot closer than any other translation in english because all of the original spacial specifications are employed. I printed a full copy and bound it, my mom has it now. This is getting to be awfully long I'll write about the other projects another time.

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