Friday, June 27, 6-8pm
Free

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.

Continuing our yearlong drift through the theme of MIGRATION, Proteus Gowanus and the Writhing Society beckon you to join us for a conversation with Gretchen E. Henderson, a writer whose deforming “novel” is a migrating across genres, disciplines, material and virtual realms.

Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité is a deforming book that invites collaborative participation, as this novel-as-poem-as-essay-as-art migrates outside of the bounds of the Book and communally redefines Deformity. Her wide-ranging critical and creative practices and projects explore aesthetics of deformity, museology as narrative strategy, poetics, the history and future of the book, and literary appropriations of music.

Gretchen received the Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize for Innovative Writing and is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. She is the author of a critical work exploring literary appropriations of music and silence, On Marvellous Things Heard (Green Lantern Press, 2011), a poetry chapbook based in cartographic history, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), and the deforming novel, Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books, 2011), which invites participation at: http://difformite.wordpress.com.

Copies of Gretchen Henderson’s books will be available for sale.

For our last exhibition of the Paradise year, we focus on Bedevilment, in collaboration with our friends at Curious Matter, who will install an exhibit within the exhibit entitled The Naming of the Animals.

Myth says that naming the animals is an obligation assigned to humankind at the creation and it is one that has never ceased to demand attention: the task of naming, ordering, cataloging, dividing, pairing, discerning, describing, speaking…. Indeed, Paradise itself, where naming first began, was a place divided and separated, which is why its beatific presence bedevils us. As the exhibitions at Proteus Gowanus and Curious Matter attest, these paradisiacal topics are vexing.

We are bedeviled by threatened harmony, endless desiring,  dangerous magic and unhinged innocence, all on view in the works of 19  artists, writers , designers and collectives. Also in store is the Spring line-up of evening events with musicians, scholars, priests, dancers, filmmakers, historians and writers.

The exhibit at Proteus opens this Saturday and will run through July 16. The show at Curious Matter opened on April 3 and closes May 15. For details on Naming the Animals and directions to Curious Matter, click here.

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In addition, we are pleased to host this spring two Paradise projects-in-residence. In the work of Madhu Kaza’s Here Is Where We Meet and Clarinda Mac Lowe’s Cyborg Nation, we examine the relationship between intimacy and service, domestic ritual and public space, and between our human selves and the smart machines which serve and guide us.

Cyborg Nation extends our recent inquiries into future utopias,  offering Teknotherapy for all who need help coping with their increasing dependence upon electronic gadgets. Have you fully accepted your cyborg nature? With Teknotherapy, a Cyborg interlocutor (or “teknotherapist”) leads group and individual sessions during April and May for those of us grappling with our machinic selves, helping us to come to terms with our relationships with our electronic extensions. For more details or to make an appointment, click here.

For our second project, Here is Where We Meet, Madhu Kaza will travel to individual participant’s homes by appointment to read them to sleep at bedtime. Here is Where We Meet is part of the artist’s ongoing Hospitality series, projects that examine social conventions, rituals of domestic and daily life, relations between strangers, hosts and guests, and boundaries of public and intimate space. Here is Where We Meet is particularly concerned with the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, the drift from the world of stories to the world of dreams, and a re-engagement of the pleasure of voice in our experience of texts. More details will be available soon.

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