Watch the event below: 

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and Wesleyan University Press in the US, and the essay Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press) which came out in 2018. He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris and Nisha Ramayya, was published by Monitor Books in February 2024. Image © Matthew Thompson

So Mayer is a writer, publisher, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their first collection of short stories Truth and Dare is out now from Cipher Press, and was long listed for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Their recent books include A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and their most recent collaborative projects are Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), The Film We Can’t See (BBC Sounds), Unreal Sex (Cipher Press), and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor. So works with Silver Press, Burley Fisher Books and queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes. 🐦@Such_Mayer. 

Elhum Shakerifar is a poet and translator; most recently of the PEN Award-winning, Warwick Prize-nominated Negative of a Group Photograph by Azita Ghahreman, alongside poet Maura Dooley (Bloodaxe Books, 2018); the poem “A Glance” was a June 2024 Poem in the Underground. In 2023, Elhum was one of Writerz & Scribez’ inaugural poetry ‘Griots’ and has shared work at the Southbank Centre, National Centre for Writing, The Africa Centre, The Common Press Bookshop, LUX, Reference Point and The Mosaic Rooms amongst other spaces. Her writing has been published by Modern Poetry in Translation, Critical Muslim, LUX, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, Film Video Umbrella, Little White Lies, MAP Magazine and Wasafiri, and translated into Czech, French and Turkish. Elhum is also a BAFTA-nominated producer and curator working through her London-based company Hakawati (‘storyteller’ in Arabic). 

Yasmine Seale is a poet, translator and critic. Her translations from the Arabic include The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun (Action Books, 2023). She is the co-author of Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022). She lives between Paris and New York, where she is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Image © Marie d’Origny

ELHUM: Welcome and thank you for joining us for this conversation around translation beyond the intelligible. My name is Elhum Shakerifar. My pronouns are she/her and I have shoulder-length brown hair. I’m wearing round glasses and one of those thick-knit winter jumpers that’s white and pink and yellow and much brighter than this December day, which is why I’m slightly darker in the frame because that’s about how much light there is. We’re tending towards the longest night, so it’s in many ways a lovely time to gather and speak about poetry and to share stories, and hopefully, wherever in the year this conversation eventually finds you, it’ll bring some warmth. I know that it’ll bring lots of interesting reflections because of who I’ve been very grateful to be able to gather in this room. Three wonderful writers: So Mayer, Will Harris and Yasmin Seale, who will introduce themselves in a second. I’m really delighted that we can share this space together and I wanted to gather you because I’m a great fan of all of your work, but most importantly because I felt the presence of a kind of slant translation in your work as poets and translators, working in really delightful ways with sounds and serendipity and marginalia and muscle memory and what is unspoken, what is felt in the body before it’s processed by the brain. This session will last for about an hour and I’ll introduce it by explaining why I came to this reflection. I’ve been a virtual translator in residence at the National Centre for Writing throughout the autumn to work on the translations of a wonderful Iranian poet called Parinaz Fahimi, who was introduced to me by a friend and who very sadly died here in London in exile in 2016. Her poetry was published and celebrated in Iran after her death but it had never been brought into the English language, the language that was spoken all around her as she breathed her last breaths. Her collection includes poetry from many years before her cancer diagnosis but the poems that most captivated me are the ones she wrote in London around the time that she was quite unwell. They’re poems that carry a very strong sense of longing towards the country she knows she won’t return to and yet they’re also very anchored to this city. Her poems also carry this kind of nostalgia that comes through wordplay, sometimes almost like games with the words, and I found quite a large range of what I feel are almost untranslatable things. But in sitting with her poetry and knowing it, the poems that spoke to me were the ones written towards the end of her life, I’ve been very conscious of breath itself as a measure of life and also as the tempo of a poem. And so one of the first things I became aware of as I thought how do I translate, how do I work with these words was the breath patterns. And alongside words and meanings, thinking about how those things are probably lost or buried somewhere in a translation. And that’s what brings us here. Translation is often presented as this decision between form and content, as if it can ever be such a strict either/or, and it just felt that there was a lot more to be said about what the body can teach us and what we might grasp through our senses outside of what the meaning is. And so this is basically where we’ll start. I thought maybe we could go to So first, around this question of where language lands in your body or in the body. If you can start by giving a little intro to yourself and then this big question.

SO: Hi. I’m So Mayer. My pronouns are they/them. I’m wearing big headphones and I have a lot of language on my body and around it. I’m wearing a blue hoodie that says ‘Team Orca’ because I am Team Orca and behind me there’s a poster with a book and some rocks on it that says ‘Books Rock’. Maybe I can start by answering the question in a very specific and literal way. I’ll also make a visual gesture to show just one of the places that language lands on my body. There’s a tattoo on my inner wrist, which has a swallow and some text in Linear B, and there are four pulse points on my body that have four tattoos in different languages, mostly ancient languages, most of which are not legible in my daily life to the people who pass me on the streets, and also one that’s in Emily Dickinson’s handwriting, which isn’t legible to anyone. So language very literally lands in my body to remind me that that’s where language begins. Perhaps because of the cancellation this week of Sesame Street by HBO, I’ve been thinking about how much early language acquisition is embodied. That could be something as simple and as naturalised as singing ‘Heads and shoulders, knees and toes’ and touching the body parts associated. Moving your body, moving up and down in rhythm, and song as well, and how quickly we are forced to forget that through formal education, that so much of our early language learning, even in utero, comes through rhythm. It comes associated with neurochemical and ceremonial changes. It comes through movement. It comes with all our other senses being activated, those that we have access to, and it comes with touch, whether we’re hearing or not hearing. Touch and gesture are huge parts of language learning and as soon as we enter into the written world, those of us for whom that was a primary form of education, that touch is also entered into the pencil point or the pen point on the page and now the fingers on the keyboard or the virtual keyboard. So the things that can remind us that language moves through our body, was learned in our body, are so important. There’s an apocryphal story that has become a tradition, which was first told by Rabbi Eliezer of Worms, and I should also say I’m Jewish. It’s an Ashkenazi diaspora custom that starts as a story and becomes a custom. When children were first learning to read Hebrew, which was generally not the language that was around them as they were growing up, they were given a slate with Hebrew letters written on it and honey on each letter and as they learned each letter, they licked the honey from the slate. And perhaps we can all reflect on our schooling and feel a little deprived, but also think about how we are conformed into the written being primary and how that leads away from our body. You don’t get honey the second time. And so, in this week of the cancellation of Sesame Street, the name that evokes folk tales and the Oedipal seed, these two kinds of deliciousness in our body, why is dominant culture so keen to separate us from all the things that you mentioned, of breath, of touch, of memory, of joy, of pain, all of these things helping us learn and remember and communicate language.?

ELHUM: That’s such a wonderful reflection. It’s funny serendipity. So this is Parinaz’s book, which is called khaashkhaashi ba alef خاشخاشی با الف. Khaashkhaashi is sesame, like the sesame on bread, and this is the first of her wordplays, which I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ll never be able to translate this’ because aleph is the first letter of the alphabet and there’s this big question mark of how do I translate this? How do I bring this? Should I keep it as aleph or should I not? Anyway, as you were speaking, it made me reflect that when I was learning to read and write in Farsi, in Persian, one of the first lines you learn is ‘pedar ab ad’ – father gave water. And it’s just so interesting how that, okay, it’s not honey on a slate, but it’s like the life force, it’s the thing that nourishes you and this idea that language is something that gives something to your body, it’s so disconnected. I’m chairing this conversation so I shouldn’t be jumping in, but I wonder whether that made you, Yasmine, reflect on some of the ways that you’ve learned language or where language lands in your body or how you reflect on that?

YASMINE: I love everything you’ve both just said. I want to just lie down and think about everything you said for a long time. I should introduce myself, I suppose. My name is Yasmine Seale. I’m sitting in a cold room full of paintings and I have a lot of hair. I really respond to what you said, So. Language was very physical for me and I think language acquisition was, too, because I grew up with different languages. My parents spoke different languages and I was going to school in a third language and living in a place that spoke another language and so I think I was surrounded by or I was bathing in a kind of soup of language without always being able to understand everything. Almost my first memories of language are of the physical pleasure of particular lines of poetry that I heard people say or music, actually, songs. I’ve always loved singing and I still do, and it’s how I learn other languages. I’ll usually start by learning a song and even languages I don’t know at all, I might know a couple of songs in that language. I recently learned an Armenian song. I know no Armenian but it’s a little window into at least some aspects of the language, if not the sense aspect. Last night I was singing, I went to a carol service. I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, so the rituals of Christmas are really something I’ve discovered later in life. I’ve got very interested in carols and I love to sing them and last night we sang what I think is one of the most beautiful carols, In the Bleak Midwinter, which I think is a Christina Rossetti poem, and it has that incredible line in the middle, which is just ‘snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow’ and it’s such a moving moment in the poem. And when you’ve said the word ‘snow’ or when you’ve sung it for the last time, you’re completely enveloped by it and your mouth is full of it and I think better than any description of snow is that pure repetition of the word. And now that I think of it, the line is a palindrome. ‘Snow on snow on snow’ reads the same one way and the other, a bit like snow itself, which looks the same whichever way you look at it. And even a snowflake, which I guess is symmetrical in all these different ways. So that line has the structure of a snowflake, which is amazing. I think if I were translating that line, I would be thinking about that. How can I translate it in a way that gives that overwhelming feeling of being enveloped by this substance? Or how can I invent a line that has the structure of a snowflake?

ELHUM: It’s like a wonderful prompt. And then it has the structure of the snowflake. Where does that take you, Will?

WILL: I felt like I knew you were going to say that carol. That’s the poet’s carol and so it’s good. I was forced to go to church up until the age of fifteen because I went to a Catholic primary school. I should say I am sitting surrounded by lamps and I am in an office. I’m wearing a blue jumper. I have dark hair and I’m an East Asian-looking person in their thirties. Okay, that’s somehow getting more uncomfortable the more I zeroed in on my myself. But moving on. That carol is so good. I remember also having that same realisation with those lines. Only a poet could have harnessed such simplicity. This conversation about language in the body and early language acquisition is actually taking me somewhere else, which I hadn’t expected to talk about. I was thinking about how most of my earliest memories are in Beijing, in China, because my mum’s Indonesian but she’s from a Chinese-Indonesian family. There’s a significant Chinese Indonesian minority in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, that’s been there for centuries. So she didn’t grow up speaking Chinese and she didn’t actually finish school. But as an adult, when I was around four, she did a mature degree in Chinese at the University of Westminster and she took me with her for her year abroad. So some of my earliest memories are actually wandering around the University of Peking and also sharing a bed in the same student dorm as my mum and two other students. And I was put in a nursery – was it a nursery or a kind of kindergarten? I’m not sure what they would have called it – and I picked up Mandarin while I was there and everyone was really fascinated with me because I was an outsider. But I also assimilated quite quickly and I’ve only realised over the last few years that I have this kind of idealised memory cubbyhole of this time because it was a period, perhaps because my language abilities were obviously pretty limited, I was four or five, where everything felt like it was in sync, how I appeared to others, racially, and how I spoke. Then I came back to London and I went back to my Catholic state primary school in West London, in Chiswick, and again there were the same assumptions which I’d had before and which I would always have. Like, I should be able to speak more languages than English, I should be able to speak Chinese, Indonesian, whatever. And I think because of that year out, I found the alphabet particularly hard. I remember just really not getting it and I still kind of struggle with the order of letters, it seems completely arbitrary to me. I only discovered Gertrude Stein a few years ago and I had this feeling, when I was reading Tender Buttons, that that was how I connected to language when I came back to London. Each of the named sections in Tender Buttons is some sort of household object or a piece of food. There’s one called ‘Apple’, which begins, ‘apple, plum, carpet, steak, seed, clam’ and so there’s this seemingly arbitrary relationship between the objects and the description. But to me, what she’s doing is she’s writing into the feel of the word. So, kind of like with the Hebrew letters on the slate, she’s not trying to create a mimetic relationship between an object and sound but a kind of tactile sense of how letters actually feel to someone who’s trying to grasp them completely from the outside. It’s such an amazing founding principle for what poetry can be, rather than this idea, which took me years to get my head around and the way that literature is taught in schools, which is that it should be mimetic, that we’re finding words for a feeling as opposed to something more artificial to do with the words, the shapes of words and letters and sounds, which almost secondarily involves the world itself. It’s quite an abstract way of putting it but I hope it makes some sense.

YASMINE: When you said ‘I picked up Mandarin’ it made me think of a child picking up a piece of fruit, like it was on the tree and you picked it and fed yourself with it. It’s an image of such ease and sensuality. I’m interested in the images we use to talk about language acquisition, specifically, and understanding, more generally. When we were writing to each other to prepare for this conversation, So, you pointed out how peculiar the word ‘intelligible’ is in the way that it makes this distinction between what can be comprehended by the intellect, as opposed to all the other senses, all the other ways we have of apprehending the world. And I was thinking of the word ‘grasps’, which is itself a bodily metaphor, as if we can’t help but involve the body, even when we’re trying to talk about purely intellectual comprehension. But ‘grasps’ is quite an aggressive image for what understanding actually is and feels like. If you explain something to me and I understand it, I’m not taking something from you, let alone taking it sort of violently. That’s what’s beautiful about understanding. So I’m interested in this question of what would happen if we didn’t think of understanding or knowledge like a hand taking but like another sense organ, maybe an ear.

WILL: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at. That’s the thing I was going to talk about, maybe at this juncture or later, homophones and puns. Understanding implies something that moves up and down. Whereas what you’re saying, something that’s more lateral or the way we hear things or mishear things, natural processes, that’s how things evolve and things can be wrong and wrongness can be a place of growth. A child who hears the word ‘grasp’ might not think of it like an adult does, as a violent act. They might think of grass or something like that and think of planting something or rolling around. That kind of mishearing can sprout into all sorts of new understandings.

YASMINE: Yesterday, I said the word ‘Hindustani music’ because I was talking about Indian music and I said Hindustani music and someone thought I was saying ‘understanding music’.

SO: I’ve also been thinking about how, in Rastafarianism, people talk about overstanding not understanding. So, punning, refusing the language of Babylon by playing with it, turning it upside down on its axis, is a part of worship practices. It’s a part of how it rewrites engagement. It’s a sacred game and it’s both play and sacred. And that seems both profoundly what children do, to me, this way of grasping it or grasping a continuity of it, and such an important part of how things like puns and homophones, the common form of resistance become, in Stein’s work in particular, a way of using code around sexuality on the body. There’s a wonderful collection called Baby Precious Always Shines, which is the typewritten notes that Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas, used to write for each other, even though they lived in the same house together for about fifty years, and almost all of them are about their digestive systems. One of the reasons why Alice B. Toklas wrote a cookbook was because of constipation. And so the conversation around what Lifting Belly and other of Gertrude Stein’s famous poems mean comes into this really interesting book. I’m not one for diagnosing writers or saying that people just write from the symptomatics of our physical bodies, but how infrequently we talk about them. Like Will, as you were saying, in standard literary criticism, where the mimesis is very much around felt thought, not even felted thought, which, like Elhum’s jumper, would be so beautiful. This idea of the way our thoughts entangle with each other, and maybe that’s a non-violent, non-acquisitive form of grasping, the way a thistle grasps wool and then someone finds wool on the thistle or fence and knits it or makes something with it. That acquisitiveness comes from the hold of capitalism over our language, to grasp another person’s hand is not violent or acquisitive. So a pun has the stickiness of a thistle. Two words or more grasp and grapple together. I’ve been thinking about puns as quantum superpositions. So, bringing together the work of Australian First Nations writer Tyson Yunkaporta and physicist Roger Penrose, who speaks about brain state, understanding within a brain state as happening because of a quantum superposition in which two states, the one in which we do understand and one in which we don’t, collapse into each other, so there’s actually a spatio-temporal change, such that we now have always understood that. Relax, it’s particle physics, as someone apparently said to Alan Connor, according to an interview this weekend. So when a pun happens, we understand things about both or more of the words, sometimes it’s even in languages, like ‘Hindustani’ and ‘understand’. So we know something more about them, not something less, by their grasping and grappling together, and it moves backwards in time and changes where that word sits in our body because of how it’s occurring to us neurally and that also makes us laugh because there’s such joy in the crossing of the spark gap. It generates neurochemical wonder and fizz in our brains. So to talk about the body, to talk about constipation or neurochemicals, it’s not reductive. These things shape how we use language and why there’s such a push to cut us off from that. Will, you talked about coming back to, maybe we could use the phrase ‘hostile environment’, where there was a dissociation of language in the body and particularly of some bodies more than others, of bodies that were not seen as being naturalised in certain languages or acting in certain ways in certain languages. And puns can restore some of that to us, or homophones, slippages, plays on words. I love the aleph and its association with the seed, that as the first letter it’s the seed of everything that’s going to come after.

YASMINE: I had a similar question of how to translate aleph when I was translating a story from The Thousand and One Nights. A woman is described, it’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of a person that I’ve come across in The Nights, as having Babylonian eyes and the poise of an aleph, which I decided to keep as aleph, aleph’s poise, because nothing is like aleph. An aleph is not an A, I should say, and I like the idea that someone might be prompted to go and look up aleph or think about it, or learn to draw it, learn to write one letter of the Arabic alphabet through this translation.

ELHUM: I personally relate to that very strongly because there are two alephs in my name, the Arabic version of my name translated, mis-transliterated in fact by my father into E. E is correct, I suppose, E and U, but the U probably would have been less confusing as an A. But again, it speaks back to this idea of where these symbols are like these wrappers that we place around things. But they’re not exactly translations or they’re not exact translations. They’re like keepers or holders but they don’t necessarily represent the whole. This forever complicated reality of my name comes from the aleph, so I try to respect it.

SO: Always going back to the beginning.

ELHUM: Always going back to the beginning. On this point of onomatopoeic words, and maybe that’s a nice segue to think about practice and how you reach for different things in your practice around writing or translating, one of the things that really struck me around Parinaz’s work is the amount of wordplay. In Persian, there is a lot of wordplay, a lot of repetition, a lot of onomatopoeic words, and there are some that she uses that I’ve never heard before. So I almost was crowdsourcing responses, opinions, what people thought she meant based on thinking that I’ve never come across this and I was really intrigued to find this range of reflections and it underlines how sometimes these onomatopoeic words are very personalised, you create them yourself. We actually made a list of my cousins for this. There was this poem, vakh vakh az Sohrab, واخ واخ از سهرا and we came up with all of the words that have these two, like hesh-hesh, zar-zar, hah-hah, and they’re all things that could take on different meaning depending on where they are and people just invent this kind of rhyming word all the time. Anyway, maybe that’s a nice way of bringing this question of practice because this made me realise that I actually translate a lot in conversation with people and am almost crowdsourcing responses to see where does my feeling fit with other people’s feelings. I wondered, Yasmine, whether maybe you can reflect on that?

YASMINE: I’m still thinking about your name, actually, and how the mis-transliteration means that there’s the word ‘hum’ in your name, which is the sound of the bee, the sound of honey. But also the sound before language. I feel that all translations begin with this kind of humming, where you’re in this kind of Babelish soup before remaking something in another language.

ELHUM: It’s funny that you say that because I was writing about this the other day. I remembered your erasure poem, The Story of the Hum. I don’t know whether that’s something you’d like to reflect on, this idea of different ways of looking at a text, different ways of looking at different translations of The Nights, for instance, finding even The Story of the Hum on this page.

YASMINE: Oh, it’s sweet of you to bring it up. This was an erasure I made of a page from a 19th century translation of The Nights. It’s actually the first page of a story called The Story of the Humpback. I erased the title so that it became The Story of the Hum and then erased everything on that page except the letter M. And so it becomes the story of the hum and then mmm, just a sequence of m’s arranged down the page. I was thinking about this idea of the hum being this kind of pre-verbal moment before words come but also thinking of lullabies, thinking of the language of women and women’s song and techniques of comforting children and perhaps comforting oneself. And also thinking of Shahrazad as a kind of machine. I thought of this hum almost like the hum of a machine, that she’s on autopilot in some way or she’s like this kind of electrical grid that has to keep on generating.

ELHUM: Do you find that finding these riddles within a page, within a translation help you understand it anew or open up another door in terms of your wider understanding of it? And do you look for them or do they come to you?

YASMINE: Well, The Nights are a special case because it’s a work that’s been translated so many times and has so many layers that have accumulated over these texts. So I felt a strong desire to play with it, not just to serve it. Translation can be a form of service, which can be a very beautiful one, especially if this text has never been heard before in English. If I’m translating those kinds of texts, I often feel a great sense of responsibility and I want to serve the text and become a kind of vessel for it. But with The Nights I felt quite a rebellious sense of wanting to mistranslate it sometimes or to speak back to it or to take it in another direction from what it was telling me to do. It’s almost like a game, The Nights. I think it really invites response and it’s always leaping off the page. I often feel that it doesn’t really want to be a book. It wants to be something else or to take on a more embodied form.

ELHUM: Will, around this question of finding practice, I’m thinking of your poem Say and how this word or this reflection comes to you.

WILL: I was just thinking that the perfect embodied form is the hum. It makes me think of a reading a couple of months ago where a poet, Ali Smith, began by getting everyone in the audience to hum. So everyone’s bodies were tuned into the same frequency and then she read her poem into that. It was a really beautiful moment. I think that poem, in particular, links back to talking about the body. I was thinking a lot about broken bodies because my dad had been very ill, and he’s not a very talkative person. But he’d found this brick that had washed up on the Thames which said ‘say’ on it and he gave that as a gift to my partner and I just thought that was both a very moving and quite tragic gift for someone who’s incapable of saying anything. And also it was broken off from a larger bit of masonry with a business’s name on it. So I just had this word ‘say’ in my head and I think in that poem I actually equated ‘say’ with this idea, this real keen idea of flow and that saying doesn’t always have to be verbal. Actually, the best part of that poem, the part that I really love, is the part which was just a quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which I think I mistranslated to try and make it slightly more memorable, which is ‘whether you say nothing or just whisper, you speak with all you are.’ So that idea that you say in spite of. The whole poem was trying to cross the breach, the lack of communication between me and my dad and also the kind of racial divide between us, since my dad’s white and often says simply off-colour stuff about race. He kind of speaks into his ignorance about it. So it was about what can be said or held between us that is unsaid, which is a big theme in my book. In fact, the thing I was going to talk about was going to be about homophonic translation because the book begins with this kind of wall of words, beginning ‘rend’ and ending ‘rendang’, which was my way into the book, thinking about myself as this bad pun in that I look East Asian but I can’t perform in a lot of the ways people might expect me to. So I began with this bad pun of rending and rendang, one being the Southeast Asian curry, rendang, and rending being breaking apart or, actually, putting together. So I’ve always been fascinated with that, with translation, bad translation and in particular homophonic translations. It was a really nice thing to discover, when I finally managed to get hold of Don Mee Choi’s book, The Morning News is Exciting, that the first poem in her first book is also a homophonic translation of the other Martinician poet, Monchoachi. His poem is called Manteg and her poem is called Manegg and it’s really great and playful. And it feels like, for her, the homophonic translation is a way to carve out space for herself. This is how I read into it, as a racialised subject in which there’s always such a monolithic equation being made of race equals nation and often equals language as well. And so the kind of playfulness or rebelliousness of mistranslation is a way of refusing some of that and making new senses, new kinds of sense. And there’s some really great lines. It’s also very bodily. One couplet goes, ‘None say dumb. None say none. Yoke behind and be fair, only to piss on.’

YASMINE: I often think about this when I’m translating, not explicitly making homophonic translations, but I often aspire to have little moments of pure sound that might be understood by anyone. I guess that’s the dream of it. These moments in the translation that are like portals where everyone could understand. The archetypal example of this in my mind, for some reason, is a line in a translation by Basil Bunting, who made some really interesting translations from Farsi and I wonder if you’ve seen them, Elhum, or what you think of them. I don’t really read Farsi, so I don’t know what the original was, but I think this is a line from a poem by Saadi, and Bunting says, ‘My tears trickled and fell plip on the ground.’ That word ‘plip’, just in the middle of the line, I really love and again I feel it’s such a kind of poet’s move to have this quite unusual onomatopoeia, not the expected word for that sound, if you see what I mean. But it’s so striking and it’s exactly the sound that this fat tear would make.

ELHUM: I don’t know that poem, actually, or in the translation. I’m trying to think of what the Farsi might have been. But I do love that and I’m going to look it up.

SO: It makes me think about how, going back, I suppose, to the question of the quote, unquote ‘untranslatable’ or what we reach for or what is considered inside or outside various kinds of intelligibility is often to do with the body and often to do with extremes of emotion. I had the privilege of studying some classical languages at school and I remember the encounter with the cries in tragedies. These are often cited as a famous example of untranslatability and a poet will handle them typographically, often very playfully. So, ‘Evoe’, the Bacchic cry, or ‘Aiaiaiaiai’, the tragic cry, and the idea that we would somehow have to translate these when they’re both contextually specific virtual practices and accessible if we listen, if we use our ears to go to the image of openness, of absorption, of allowing things to affect us. It made me wonder about how in formal and imperialist ways, translation can be used to stop understanding. Taught practices of translation are often themselves mistranslation because they are deliberately misrepresenting the qualities of language as well as semantic content in order to sever both the original speakers from their right to make meaning and any possibility of improvised intercommunication between language communities. So I think the word ‘translation’ obviously covers as much as living being or culture. But looking at some of those instances where one comes up against translation and the way in which language partakes of law, of borders, of censorship, of silencing or removing permission and how that begins in removing that connection to the sensory and to memory. I just want to read a quotation, actually a tweet, because we’re very up to date here. I will only call it Twitter, sorry. This is from a Mixe language activist and writer, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. It was originally on Twitter but it’s included in the collection This Mouth is Mine, which has been published by Charco and translated. The material in it that’s in Spanish has been translated by Ellen Jones, the material in Mixe has remained in Mixe. Gil is an activist for the expansion of language awareness, against imperialising, homogenising languages. So, in her context, against the imposition of Spanish on the multiple language communities in the territory called Mexico, and she writes, ‘The foundation of writing is visual symbols. The foundation of the oral tradition is not the voice but rather memory.’ This has just sat in my chest for weeks now. My immediate thought was, ‘But writing is about memory as well.’ We learn to write these arbitrary symbols and we learn to write them in their arbitrary order. And we also learn an arbitrary strict orthography. So I’ve been learning a little bit about some of the traditions of handwriting, Anglophone handwriting. For example, in the 18th century, middle-class white women were taught a different orthography than white men were taught in their fancy boarding schools. So that was a way of excluding them from any employment that involved scrivening because their handwriting was not considered acceptable. And this is even talking about those who had the privilege to be educated. So, written language, these written symbols, as well as the way we speak, are accented, to pick up a word from theory, but also a practice that we inhabit. So the more we move into those fixed symbols, the further away we move from their fluidity, which I think Gil beautifully situates, not in voice, as in individual attributes, but in memory as a collective practice. I haven’t fully worked out why this is expanding in my chest each time I breathe and swallow, but it feels like it’s consolated something that’s been moving through my mind since we’ve been thinking about having this conversation about what are we doing when we’re making language. We’re making memories together, we’re drawing on memories that we hold collectively to make memories for our future selves and future generations. And that’s so clear in how Gil talks about indigenous language activism. But I hadn’t felt it in my body before. That probably doesn’t answer any questions whatsoever.

ELHUM: It opens so many doors. It feels like there’s something that turned a key almost, kind of opened something. In your chest, that’s where you refer to it landing.

SO: I think homophonous translation brings us back to that sensory aspect of language, in that all the radical, anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist ways, that what we’re saying can be one of those keys as well. To remember that sound is sense, they are not separable from each other. And sense as sound.

WILL: I’m kind of grappling with it. It’s really amazing, an amazing way of putting it, that idea of not translating the voice, the individual, but the memory, something collective. And then translation as kind of recollectivising, like bringing it into a larger collective pool. It’s making me think of what you said about the pun as being more rather than less. Translation is always additive, you’re always adding more. It’s never like a kind of tracing paper, a like for like thing. You are, in a sense, trying to tap into some sort of collective unconscious which is linking with that work.

SO: That feels like it brings us back to Elhum’s image of crowdsourcing, that translation is always a practice of listening to each other, even if you’re not asking. I love following those threads on social media where people with such knowledge and investment, and also often great play and laughter, are sharing across sometimes very niche practical vocabularies, where we also notice how certain vocabularies for particular kinds of artisanal practices are being lost from the everyday or for species. You know, how long will we have jam-making languages? It depends on the berries. It’s such a frightening thing to say but it’s so true. That language can only be collective, like in those ways that Will’s saying. It depends on that so much. And we’re talking about all these different ways of going into it, from the patterning of the snow. Although, Yasmine, I have to say, for an hour now I’ve been thinking there’s only five snows and a snowflake has six points. So where is the sixth point? Is it in the extension of the snow, with all the O’s? Sorry to be so insistent on radial symmetry. Once you go into these ways of thinking, things open laterally, they open spatially, they open dimensionally.

YASMINE: It’s really interesting you say that because I misremembered the line ‘sno-oo-w on snow’ as being ‘snow on snow on snow’.

SO: Which would be six!

YASMINE: So maybe that sixth snow is somehow buried in the long snow. It’s there somewhere. There’s room for it in there. I love what you said about the cries of the tragic heroes. This question of translating ancient emotions is something I’m dealing with at the moment, actually. I’m translating the poems of a woman who lived in the pre-Islamic period. Just before the rise of Islam, she was more or less a contemporary of the prophets and perhaps at the end of her life she converted but we can’t know about for sure. But in any case, the poetry of hers that survives is in some ways the last expression of a worldview that was about to be displaced by Islam’s revolutionary vision and it’s a different kind of moral code and a different idea of justice. Most of her poems, the poems she’s known for, are poems of grief. She writes about her brothers who’ve been killed in battle and she’s writing about grief because grief or elegy is one of the few genres that women are able to write in. So women are not writing qasidas, which is the classical poetic form, they’re usually just writing elegies, but within this genre of the elegy she is writing about all kinds of things. All of her poems, all of her lamentations, begin in the same way, which is with an address to her eyes. It’s a kind of imperative address where she’s calling on her eyes to weep. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to translate that because it’s very intimate, it’s almost like all of these poems are letters that begin ‘Dear I’, letters addressed to some part of herself. But at the same time they’re imperatives, so they’re almost like battle cries where she’s calling on her eyes to release a flood of tears. There’s something quite martial about this image of abundance and being lavish in your grief and not holding back. So even just how to punctuate that is interesting. I’m resisting the exclamation mark because I sometimes feel that you can be even more powerful without an exclamation mark or the exclamation mark creates a certain kind of atmosphere that I don’t necessarily want for these poems, which are very public and at the same time very intimate.

SO: I’m just thinking about the imperative comma in the title of Lydie Salvayre’s Cry, Mother Spain. So, rather than an exclamation mark, the direction is given through a comma, a short pause. I think punctuation is so much a part of this conversation. Elhum, you began by talking about breath and the question of whether punctuation is something that arises from the breath of spoken language or is an indicator of written grammar and how, particularly in poetry, also using this non-Persian white space, that relationship between the body and the borders, the boundaries, the rules is navigated. Yasmine, I was wondering whether the poems would have been sung aloud or were they from a written practice?

YASMINE: They would have been spoken. Although, to go back to the word ‘say’, the word ‘say’ in Arabic. The verb qala means ‘to say’ and it also means ‘to sing’ and to recite poetry and it can also mean to compose poetry. So you get these songbooks which are like anthologies of poems, where you get a short biography of a poet and then ‘He said’ and then a few lines of his quoted. So all of these are aspects of the same activity within the imagination of that word. But her poems would have been spoken and to some degree improvised. She was known for her skill in improvisation and this is maybe also a part of this conversation, the place of oral recitation and oral composition and also collaboration, which I know is one of the things we were thinking of talking about. The way a lot of poetry was composed in this period was that you would go to a marketplace and meet with another poet and they would begin a poem with a certain rhyme scheme and meter and they would say to you ‘Finish this poem’ and you had to finish it following the same rhyme scheme and the same meter in a way that made the first poet look bad. It’s called verse-capping and she is known to have been particularly excellent at this, and it’s not clear whether these grief poems were composed in the same way.

WILL: So, in translating it, you’ve not only got to translate her but also create this sense of the social space in which they might have happened?

YASMINE: Yeah, and just the ideas of what justice looks like, I’m finding very hard to think about. The question in all of these poems is, what do you do when someone has been unjustly killed? And a lot of the poems are calling for some kind of retribution. It is a code in the same way that we have a code of justice or an idea of what justice might look like but it’s a somewhat different idea. So the challenge is trying to give a sense of the code within which she’s operating or the idea of justice.

WILL: How do you translate that, the idea of justice?

YASMINE: I’m thinking a lot about the phrase ‘getting even’ and the resonance of that.

SO: Which has rhyme scheme implications as well, because we talk about odd and even lines or the evenness of language. Contemporary English tends to pack a lot of hidden juridical as well as capitalist thinking into its metaphors. It’s almost impossible to speak out with the legal control and legal use of language and yet it’s very unacknowledged in a lot of contemporary writing, so it’s fascinating to hear about poems that speak so directly and acknowledge or call on the implications of poetic speech and legal speech, that to engage in saying, to engage in composing a poem is to engage in the arena of law and politics, that you’re calling for language to be active, not necessarily performative but to act differently, that it’s not just that a judge or an admiral decides. That is, in a sense, an unjust act but that poetry has its role in restorative justice. I think about Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas as a poem that is doing this specifically or NourbeSe’s Zong! through using and unusing, unwriting, the legalistic language that seeks to take that power away from us as ordinary citizens. So I can’t wait to read these translations.

YASMINE: It’s very interesting the way you put it, language being active, almost as a form of justice or as a mode of justice because the poems often end with a call to remember, to remember this person and to remember what happened to them. So it’s as if memory itself were a form of justice, that the greatest injustice would be for this to be forgotten.

ELHUM: That feels such a potent place to round off this conversation. I feel like what we’ve come to is a space of almost thinking of how we also are almost like translated bodies translating translated bodies and how we translate it into space and translate around it. And I feel also that we could have kept talking for another hour but hopefully we can gather again. Thank you so much for sharing this space and for being so generous with your reflections. It’s opened up so many doors in my brain and I look forward to sitting with them longer and also sitting with you all very soon.

Supported by Visible Communities Residencies.