TG meets Enemies

‘kälte’ to ‘cold’, film to spoken word

Workshop at International Translation Day, 26 September 2014, British Library, London
led by Ricarda Vidal and Steven J. Fowler

This workshop built on ‘p.o.w’ at the Poetry Library in March 2014 and ‘from Image to Text’ at the TCCE conference in June 2014, though this time we worked with professional translators and interpreters.
While a group of German specialists translated Ricarda’s German version of Paul Brown’s ‘cold’ back into English after having watched Anna Cady’s filmic translation of the poem, the rest of the participants split into three groups and translated the film itself back into poetry. In one case this resulted in a multilingual spoken-word performance, which was delivered to roaring applause…
With every translation game we play I become more and more convinced that there really is an essence to every text and that it is possible to capture it and preserve it, no matter how far removed the target language is from the source.
Many thanks to the Free Word Centre for inviting us to take part in International Translation Day!

Click here for a more detailed write-up of the session by Sam Sedgman from the Free Word Centre.

Paul Brown’s ‘cold’ (click image to enlarge)

Anna Cady’s filmic translation of ‘cold’

The translation of Anna’s film into spoken word