Many of the words we use to describe our experience as readers and writers come from our much earlier experience of water: flow, reflection, transparency, stream of consciousness. We sink into a book, or become immersed in a story. Poets have used rivers, the sea, rain, storms, as a fortune-teller uses a crystal ball: to read the obscure messages that come from both without and within. Novelists have used water imagery to structure narrative: time as a river, or the passage of lives as waves. Come join us as we continue our yearlong exploration of water and listen to the work of Emily Dickinson, J.G.Ballard, Tarjei Vesaas, Stevie Smith and Virginia Woolf, as they contemplate water in its many forms.

Reading organized by Wendy Walker. The readers are Cathy Fuerst, Janice Everett, Tom LaFarge, Henry Wessells and Wendy Walker.

 
Nils Johan Olsson Blommér, The Water-Sprite and Ägir’s Daughters

The battles fought at night between white and black witches. The battle fought at bedtime between a newly married royal couple. The battle fought in subway stations with poisoned chewing gum. The battle fought with children in a dream. The culture war fought as an emergent species struggles for recognition as a civilized kind. The key battles of such “secret wars” will be the matter read aloud from translations of Czech, Japanese, American, Italian, and Old Irish crypto-military histories. Organized by Wendy Walker, editor of Proteotypes, the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus.

Texts and paper will be provided; please bring a pen.

The War of Words contains at least one fruitful struggle: the clash of languages on the battlefield of the translator’s brain, as loaded vocabularies mass and charge. Yet no struggle is more pleasurable since, of all readers, the translator enters into the most intimate relationship with the source text. But what if you know only one language? Or don’t know the language you want to translate? To this dilemma solutions will be offered by Writhing Society leaders Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge.

Homophonic Translation

There’s more to translate than just the sense of a text; there’s also the sound. Homophonic translation strips the sense out of the original text and keeps only the sounds, then finds English words that repeat those sounds as nearly as possible. Participants will be given text to translate from some little-known language, and we will see what sort of sense different people make from that sound-montage. [Those ambitious to translate both sound and sense will be given that opportunity.]

Fenollosa

Ezra Pound admired Chinese ideograms because they made words into images. But he didn’t know Chinese. To make his translations, he asked his friend Ernest Fenollosa, a professor at Harvard, to make a character-by-character translation of some classic Chinese poems, giving the possible meanings of each character. Since the ideograms themselves do not declare much about their place in the sentence but only their meaning, he first chose the meaning that seemed to fit best and then came up with the syntax on which to string these pearls. We will do the same, using a trot prepared by Proteus Gowanus friend Ron Janssen.

Cost: $10
Texts and paper will be provided; bring a pen.
Free wine for $2 a glass.

The War of Words contains at least one fruitful struggle: the clash of languages on the battlefield of the translator’s brain, as loaded vocabularies mass and charge. Yet no struggle is more pleasurable, since of all readers the translator enters into the most intimate relationship with the source text. But what if you know one language only? Or don’t know the language you want to translate? To this dilemma solutions will be offered by Writhing Society leaders Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge.

Homophonic Translation

There’s more to translate than just the sense of a text; there’s also the sound. Homophonic translation strips the sense out of the original text and keeps only the sounds, then finds English words that repeat those sounds as nearly as possible. Participants will be given text to translate from some little-known language, and we will see what sort of sense different people make from that sound-montage. [Those ambitious to translate both sound and sense will be given that opportunity.]

Fenollosa

Ezra Pound admired Chinese ideograms because they made words into images. But he didn’t know Chinese. To make his translations, he asked his friend Ernest Fenollosa, a professor at Harvard, to make a character-by-character translation of some classic Chinese poems, giving the possible meanings of each character. Since the ideograms themselves do not declare much about their place in the sentence but only their meaning, he first chose the meaning that seemed to fit best and then came up with the syntax on which to string these pearls. We will do the same, using a trot prepared by Proteus Gowanus friend Ron Janssen.

Note: This workshop will be limited to sixteen people. Please reserve your spot by writing to email hidden; JavaScript is required.