Workshop
TETC Translation Workshop
Paul Celan, Susan Bernofsky

Artscape Gibraltar Point

Tue, 09/07/2021
9:30 AM - 15:30

TETC X GIT Toronto Island Workshop

Guided by members of TETC, participants will spend the first part of the morning discussing texts and materials related to (experimental) translation. This will be followed by two workshops, each one led by different members of TETC. These workshops will engage with one or several of Celan’s early poems as well as with the landscapes and soundscapes of Toronto Island. Participants will collaborate and create hybrid experimental translations incorporating a variety of media.

Registration is limited, please email carter.west@goethe.de to secure a place.

This event is free. Lunch and transportation, to and from the Island, will be provided.

Please note, a portion of the workshop will be recorded.

Itinerary

9:30am // Meet at water taxi

10am // Arrive at Artscape Gibraltar Point

1015 // TETC introduction & readings

11am // First workshop on Paul Celan

12pm // Lunch (provided)

1pm // Second workshop on experimental translation

2pm // Online talk with Susan Bernofsky

3pm // Workshop Concludes

Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky’s literary translations include eight works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Uljana Wolf, and others. A Guggenheim fellow and former chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she co-edited (with Esther Allen) the Columbia University Press anthology In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She is currently completing work on a biography of Robert Walser for Yale University Press and blogs about translation at www.translationista.com.

TETC

Combining the formats of seminars, workshops, and performances, the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective (TETC) renegotiates relationships within and across languages and media. TETC uses methods of homophonics, transcription, field recording, algorithmic distortion, and cross-disciplinary hybridity to create spaces for heterotopic pedagogy. The texts, recordings, and performances produced document the unlearning of prior assumptions around communication. These activities develop strategies for withdrawal from the instrumentalization of language systems. In addressing the hegemonic power of major languages, TETC brings to the fore language’s potential in play and protest.

NICHOLAS HAUCK is a writer, translator, and scholar. He works on 20th and 21st century French and English poetry and poetics, and thinks about translation as an embodied language performance. Nicholas has written a book on the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and has another forthcoming in 2021 on French modernist poetics. He teaches at Brock University and lives in Toronto.

FAN WU is a writer-translator and performer based in Toronto. His work focuses on questions of mourning, desire, and collectivity through methodologies of emotive conceptual thinking, where the personal and the political loop through each other. He runs workshops in collaboration with art galleries across Toronto such as Art Metropole, Mercer Union, and Trinity Square Video. You can find his work online at MICE Magazine, Aisle 4, and C Magazine.

AMI XHERRO has an MA from the University of Toronto. She is the author of a chapbook, ‘The Unfinished Flame of the Lower Oceans’ (Swimmers Group, 2017) and other poems. She is currently working on an experimental translation project on listening, the materiality of language, and its potentiality for sculpture.

JOACHIM COMAY is a poet & musician from Toronto. His first full length book of poetry, States of Emergency, is forthcoming from Vehicule Press in Fall 2022. It is the first book in a trilogy of long poems exploring the bewildering thickets of mood that make up one person’s experience over the course of a year. He is currently scribbling the third book whilst splayed romantically upon the scenic shores of Victoria, BC. An album or two may also be in the works.

BENJAMIN DE BOER is a writer, researcher, and bookseller living in Tkaronto. They received their Honours BA in Philosophy and Archaeology from the University of Toronto in 2018. Benjamin can be found studying the melancholy poetics of our earthly lyric – exploring their openness to instinct and improvisation within a practice of communal dreaming. At home in group settings, Benjamin currently co-directs Hearth, an arts space founded alongside Rowan Lynch, Sameen Mahboubi, and Philip Leonard Ocampo.

EDDY WANG enjoys exploring the intersection between media and computer science, having created several media projects that intersect the two. He is interested in translation because of his training in computational linguistics and how it opens up new ways of structuring language and grammar through the virtual.

Workshop TETC Translation Workshop Paul Celan, Susan Bernofsky