Organised by the Department of Languages and Cultures at University of Lancaster in collaboration with Critical Poetics
Part of Regenesis: A Festival of Regeneration and Renewal
Walter Benjamin described translation as ‘fortleben’, a ‘living forth’. This eco-poetry and translation workshop will explore the materiality and temporality of text making practices through composting and creative poetry translation as an afterlife, or continued life, of the text. Using an image of a composted extract of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, this workshop will explore non-human to human translation through writing and weathering processes. Can humans copy and translate non-human interactions with the text? Can decomposition be the basis of creative translation, multilingual experimentation and poetic renewal? Where does a text end, and where does its material life begin? Selecting from or inventing their own multimodal procedure, participants will be invited to forge and translate a new poem object, springing new poetic life from a composted one.
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