>> We just decided that because things take longer, time-space continuum is elastic,
we're going to undo a part of our plan and renegotiate,
so that we can have a Q&A right now, if that is desirable.
>> Yeah. So we would --
>> Thank you so much.
So now, we'll do preguntas y respuestas.
Gracias. Q&A.
So if you have a question, please raise your hand, levanten la mano, and I will come to you
with the microphone and you can ask your question.
>> So I -- This was -- It's from the enjoyable [inaudible] very interesting
and [inaudible] switch that out.
I wanted to go back to the Manifesto.
So you talked about sort of stretching for making language uncomfortable
and that the -- An act of persistence.
But since 2016, I've been feeling very uncomfortable with language
and with the relation of like power and the attacks on language we all see.
So is it -- Do you feel that that's a tension in your Manifesto?
Is it? Can you resist like new speak with more new speak?
[ Laughter ]
>> No.
But if you heard our Manifesto as in some way proposing new speak as a form of resistance,
we have some serious revision to do or I encourage you to actually read it
because I don't -- I don't believe we intended it that way.
I can say for ANTENA, I think, in saying that we see experimentation and criticality
around language and thinking through language as having a capacity
to reach beyond what we thought were our capabilities
and what we thought were our borders and our limits.
We see that as and that kind of like farthest reaching
into the beyond of what is possible in language.
We see that is actually completely connected to the very material concrete on the ground
of realities that we struggle against everyday in terms of the ways
that power is structured toward brutality
and toward marginalizing almost every single person we care about in the world
and having a negative impact on so many people that are so important in the world.
So, for us, language elasticity and language experimentation is one way
to break open the processes of listening to encourage us
to hear differently and to make a different world.
>> Yeah. And I'd also say that discomfortable writing isn't just
about making someone else feel discomfortable.
It's also about embracing your own discomfort and your own vulnerability,
your own capacity for mistake and error.
And none of those things could be said of number one.
>> Mucho gusto.
Me llamo Tony.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
I interviewed her before she came out here last week.
I work for Arizona Public Media.
So I'm a journalist.
[ Laughter ]
But I'm one of the good guys, right?
NPR, PBS. But I'm just curious in what context was somebody trying
to get you to define what poetry is?
¿En qué contexto fue que alguien quería que dijeras exactamente qué es la poesía?
>> Exactly in your work.
Yes, sometimes a journalist --
-- in Mexico, some journalists are very bad paid.
And well, they even make you an interview without reading the book
and the most quickly question is oh, what is poetry, please?
So, or which is your inspiration?
Like if you have only one answer, no?
So, I mean, it's like the cliché questions.
He made a wonderful work in the radio.
Thank you, Tony.
>> I appreciate it, thank you.
I wasn't looking for credit, but I just wanted --
[ Laughter ]
>> I had a question for John.
When I was reading your bio, I saw that you're a knitter.
>> That's actually me.
>> Oh, I'm sorry.
Oh, well. I knit.
>> A lot of people can't tell us apart.
[ Laughter ]
>> Nothing.
I was crossing my fingers for another male knitter.
[ Laughter ]
>> I'll teach you, JP.
I'll teach you.
[ Laugher ]
>> I know some, so come talk to me after.
>> I wanted to ask if that played a role in your work at all with poetry and translation.
>> Yeah, it totally does.
I love -- I also make handmade books.
I love working with my hands.
I love manual labor.
I love things that poetry feels very sometimes hard to grasp and like hard
to hang on to and it's ephemeral.
And it's hard to sit quietly with myself, like I'm not talented at that.
So anything I can do that feels concrete and repetitive, like you start the knitting pattern
and then you knit and then you have a thing and it's an actual thing that people might use.
So that is very pleasurable to me.
I love to knit at poetry readings.
I almost would even knit at my own reading, if it were socially acceptable.
I actually have my knitting with me.
So yeah. It's definitely connected.
And thinking about sort of how to construct a container,
like a knitting pattern is a kind of container.
And then, how to work into that container.
And I also, I knit a lot of places that I go in the world.
And so I think that the experiences that have while I'm knitting a particular item
for a particular person, then get into that item, you know?
So if I'm at a particular reading, then that person's work gets into the scarf,
or the wrist cuffs, or the whatever it is I'm making.
And I think of poetry in that way also is a kind of cumulative process where all
of the experiences we have, all of the language experiences we have kind of filter into the poem
and all of our cross-language experiences filter into our approach to translation.
So, yes. And thank you for that great question.
>> Great question.
>> Hello. First things first.
I want to say thank you, y gracias por estar.
Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.
What you said about supporting young translators, I just want to vouch for you all.
You have helped me twice, even though we never actually met, but you've helped me in big ways.
>> Who are you?
What's your name?
>> I'm Brian.
>> Oh, hey!
>> Yeah. [Inaudible].
>> Your book is so beautiful.
>> Thank you.
So in any case, I just want to say they're not lying.
They do help out, even without -- Even without knowing you.
So thank you for the work that you do.
[Inaudible] inspiration that's been for me especially the last couple of years [inaudible].
I'd like to hear you all talk a little bit about the process of co-translation between you two,
but also in the process of translating with the living author.
Yeah, I just think that even between just you and the author, there's so many things going on.
When you add in a third person, I can't even imagine.
And I would like to hear you to sort of talk through that.
>> Esa risa.
Alguna vez le pregunté a, creo que fue a ti, Jen --
-- que me llama la atención que de todo lo que Jen ha traducido,
solamente veo que se trata de escritores o escritoras vivas,
y ella tuvo una respuesta al respecto.
Yo no sé, JP, si en tu trabajo de traducción previo a Antena has traducido poetas no vivos,
¿no?
Y, ¿por qué sí y por qué no?
Pero sí, el proceso es muy latoso.
La cantidad de emails que yo tengo de la traducción de Ivory Black y de Onioncloth,
tuve que comprar más tiempo en Google, más más capacidad.
>> So this is a question that I've thought about asking Jen, that it really has --
It's astonishing to me or it's really come to my attention that all of, all that I've seen
of the work that she's done as a translator has only been living writers,
living female writers in particular.
And I once asked her about this and I don't know if this is the case for you JP,
if you in your work before co-translating through Antena,
if you have ever translated none living writers because perhaps you have
and perhaps you haven't, but this can be a very --
Translating living writers can be a very pain in the ass process.
That's how I interpreted latoso.
If I think about the hundreds of emails that have come back and forth between us
in the process of translating Ivory Black or Tela de sevoya, I mean,
I had to buy more time on Google.
[ Laughter ]
>> So I would say I was translating before I met Jen, but working with Jen
on translation has completely changed my translation process.
>> Because I'm so latosa.
>> Yo no dije eso, I didn't say that.
>> She, she is.
>> Myriam sí dice eso.
I didn't say that.
What I would say, we actually -- I think one of the first times that we co-translated,
and sure Jen will correct me and tell me that there was a time prior to that
when we also co-translated, but the one that's really coming to mind is we did a set of --
We translated a set of poems about what we were talking about as NAFTA poetics.
So instead of poets from Mexico and from the US, who --
And also from other places in Central America and other diasporic spaces and who were,
in some way, writing around or through the kind of free trade era.
And that was -- Doing translations from English of experimental work by Latinx authors
in the US into Spanish, translating authors from Spanish into English and vice versa.
And that was supposed to come out in an anthology previously that is not coming out of
that anthology, but we actually -- Antena Aire has a book coming
out in 2020 from the operating system.
So that section that we did about 10 poets will be included in that anthology
and that was the first time when I really remember sending back, you know, from one poem,
25 drafts back and forth and back and forth and back and forth with --
If you don't know how to use track changes
and comments very efficiently, you can't work with Jen.
>> But I'll teach you.
>> Yeah. She'll teach you.
>> And, but really, I mean that detail oriented approach is something that is a great gift
and it's something that I take with me now into all of the projects that I do,
understanding the many layers of revision, the many layers of dialogue
and conversation as part and parcel, right?
And you can tell, when the work is done, the kind of strength that it has
and the force that it has because of that.
>> Y no dijiste si es traducido a algún autor que no esté vivo.
>> Oh, and you didn't say if you translated any non-living author.
Yes, I have.
But I prefer to translate and this actually came out of conversations with Jen, long, long ago,
to make a decision to translate authors that belong to my own generation
and authors with whom I share something.
So I'm often translating queer authors of my same age range and that tends to be who I work
with because, as Jen told me 13 years ago, you know, you develop a relationship with folks
over years and years and decades.
And if you create this kind of relationships of reciprocity with those individuals, it nurtures
and it works all kinds of magic in the world.
So --
>> And if you don't know Sara Uribe's work as translated by JP, you should begin to know it
because it's right over there and you should definitely write
that book because it's really amazing.
The other --
>> And thank you for considering me your generation.
[ Laughter ]
>> The other thing of working with the living writer is just
so that people don't get the wrong impression is that it's not that Myriam is
like the final word of all final words about how the work creates.
And part of what translating does is it helps us to see how multiple every single line is
in a poem or how multiple every single poem is and how impossible it is to express
that multiplicity in the translation.
So it's not like I would get stuck on something or we would get stuck on something
and say to Myriam so what's this and she would tell us and then we would do that.
It's about the process of conversation and you or me, as a translator I have
to be willing to own my reading of that work.
So it's also really -- It's a lesson in humility and in listening to someone else's reading
but it's also a lesson in being willing to take responsibility
for the things that I say in the world.
>> Alright, one more.
>> Hola, muchas gracias para sus palabras ricas.
Tengo una pregunta sobre la lengua judio.
I don't know.
There was a language you all were talking about that is potentially dying out and I really,
really wanted to hear about that because I don't know of it.
And again, thank you so much.
I was moved very much by your poetry and by your translations, I started crying.
So thank you.
Yeah. Y me llamo Raquel.
>> Gracias, Raquel.
¿Me ayudan, por favor?
>> Claro.
>> El -- Ayer hablamos de eso en el Museo de Historia Judía.
El judeoespañol es la lengua que se hablaba a finales del siglo 15 en España.
Y es muy cercana al español contemporáneo,
pero es una lengua a la que se le metieron palabras de toda la diáspora que fue
acomodándose en distintos países europeos y en distintas lenguas.
>> So yesterday we were talking about this at the Jewish History Museum.
So judeoespañol is a language that was spoken
in the 15th century, starting in the 15th century.
It's pretty close to contemporary Spanish, but it's a language that has taken
on many different aspects of the Jewish diaspora and has taken on elements
of different European countries and a number of different languages.
>> El judeoespañol nace de esa herida, de la herida de la expulsión,
y queda viva en diversos países.
Creo que la mayor influencia la tiene del turco.
Hay muchísimas palabras en turco que no se parecen en nada al español contemporáneo.
Y en ese sentido, lo que hicimos colaborando para traducir Tela de sevoya,
pues claro que necesitaba muchas aclaraciones.
Y también tiene muchos falsos amigos, lo que se llama en traducción falsos amigos.
Por ejemplo, biervo, no es verbo sino palabra.
Se parece más a la palabra verbo, pero es en realidad palabra.
>> So Judeo Spanish, judeoespañol, is born out of that wound of expulsion and it remains alive
in a variety of different countries, and perhaps its greatest influence has been a
Turkish influence.
There is a tremendous number of Turkish words in that language that are more similar,
that don't actually have any resemblance at all to what we know of as contemporary Spanish.
So, in that sense, it was very important when we were working on the collaborative translation
of Tela de sevoya to have a very active collaboration amongst the three of us
because that language needed a tremendous amount of clarifying.
There are many many false friends, as we call them, false cognates,
in that might come up in the translation.
So, for example, the word biervo,
which you might think means verbo or verb, does not mean that.
It means word.
So even though it sounds like verb, it means word.
So there are two things we didn't do because we ran out of time.
So I'm going to tell you about one of them very briefly, and then we're going
to do the other one because it's a 30 second poem, in Ladino,
and I would like to close the evening with that poem, it's very quick.
What JP and I did not do was make ourselves wildly vulnerable in front of you.
We do a practice that we think of as interpretive improvised poem making
and I'm really sorry we didn't get to do it for a range of different reasons
and eventually we will at another point.
But we basically use consecutive interpretation which is what I was just doing with Myriam,
where she speaks in Spanish, there's a pause, I say what she said in English.
But we use the great probability or error.
It's right here, Myriam.
Está acá.
Aquí lo tengo.
The great probability of error with memory.
If you go on too long and you don't take good notes,
you can't remember to interpret consecutively.
And also, if the person is using a wildly weird use of language, as in poetry,
it's almost impossible to do consecutive interpretation.
So we do that to each other on purpose.
We read poem and or improvised poems and go on at great length, and don't allow ourselves
to look at our previous notes and then we create a poem out of that.
So that is what you will hopefully see at another point in the future.
But the other thing that we did not do was read this poem which is from a book
of poems that Myriam wrote in Latino.