Bad Languages/Mauvaises Langues

Event time: 
Monday, October 14, 2019 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Location: 
Rosenkranz Hall (RKZ ), 241 See map
115 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Speaker/Performer: 
Laura Marris
Event description: 

Created by Laura Marris and designed by Marris and artist Matt Kenyon, Bad Languages/Mauvaises Langues is an experimental video translation of a poem by Breton poet and playwright Paol Keineg that explores the idea of multiple versions of a translation existing at once. New versions of words and lines substitute themselves into the text, creating a translation that embraces shifting possibilities and connotations. Instead of the translator settling on one final version, the text remains unsettled, allowing a more complex portrait of the translator’s knowledge to remain on the page. This is not so much a process of revision as one that recreates the fluidity from which translated texts emerge.
Laura Marris is a poet and translator. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The North American Review, The Yale Review, The Cortland Review, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Daniel Varoujan Award. Recent translation projects include Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan (translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck), a graphic novel version of Proust (Liveright), and Louis Guilloux’s Blood Dark (NYRB), which was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo and is currently at work on a new translation of Albert Camus’ The Plague.

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