WEBVTT

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Seasons change their gloves.

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Seasons replace their gloves.

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The saisons changent their 手袋.

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Wear gloves to do the seasonal.

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Please wear gloves in
order to evade the seasons.

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These are five renderings,
or possibly antirenderings,

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or possibly reworkings, of
the first line of a poem

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by Chika Sagawa
called "Promenade".

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This poem serves as a
delightfully unstable anchor,

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if there is such a thing,
for Sawako Nakayasu's

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multilingual book of
translations, antitranslations,

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and originals of Chika Sagawa
and others titled Mouth Eats

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Color.

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Our guest tonight is a highly
accomplished translator

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and poet with diverse and
wide-ranging intellectual

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and aesthetic interests.

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But if you'll indulge me, I
want to zero in on Mouth Eats

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Color for a moment,
because it is

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one of those critically
important books that

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give the rest of us permission
to try something different,

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permission to solve a
problem in another way.

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In this book, Nakayasu
translates, retranslates,

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reworks, and fully rewrites
the poem "Promenade"

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no fewer than 20 times.

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In so doing, she both defangs
and cheerfully celebrates

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the translator's traditional
agony, this glowing word

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or that radiant one over there.

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Translation is a problem
because it is a trade off.

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When we translate
poetry, we are forced

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to land on just one of
many available choices,

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each with their own
peculiar beauty,

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and that can be a
soul-crushing business.

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But Mouth Eats Color
refuses that confinement.

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Here, multiple translations
make many choices.

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They allow us to hold multiple
possibilities in our minds

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at once.

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And to me, there is such
warmth and generosity

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in this approach to translation.

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We are allowed to try on
several different renderings.

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We get to choose which
versions speak to us most

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evocatively and eloquently.

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And that is a gift from the
translator to the reader.

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She offers us multiple
points of access,

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inviting us into the work
over and over and over again.

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This playful openness to
multitudinous possibility

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is a through line in Sawako
Nakayasu's work, which

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of course ranges far beyond the
single book I focused on here.

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She is a poet, performer,
translator, filmmaker,

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and an excellent
conversationalist.

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Her work is in dialogue with
dance, film, performance,

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and dreams.

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When I read her poems,
I also hear a dialogue

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with certain of her
translations and vise versa,

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and that is a rich vein
of material indeed.

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Sawako Nakayasu is the author
of five full-length collections

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of poetry and five books of
translations from the Japanese,

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including translations of
work by Takashi Hiraide, Ayana

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Katawa, and the great
practitioners of the Butoh

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dance form, Tatsumi
Hijikata and Moe Yamamoto.

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She is the recipient of an NEA
fellowship and a PEN poetry

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and translation
award, among others,

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and her translation of the
collected poems of Chika Sagawa

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was the first full-length
collection of Sagawa's poetry

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to appear in English,
making the work

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of this important Japanese
modernist poet suddenly

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and dazzlingly accessible to
English-speaking audiences.

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In her recent book, The
Ants, Nakayasu writes, "Today

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is a unique holiday
commemorated by a parade

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of black, four-legged
stools going down

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the closed-off street.

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All the neighborhood
ants come out

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to take a look, most of whom
take a very critical stance."

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And that's cool, right?

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I mean, ants gonna ant.

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But I, for one, am so looking
forward to being a neighborhood

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ant who takes a very
open-hearted stance tonight

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in imitation and appreciation
of our guest this evening--

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her generosity,
her delightedness,

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her deep and abiding curiosity.

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Please help me welcome
Sawako Nakayasu.

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