Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics

This chapter attends to the nuances and difficulties in reading and translating contemporary translingual poetry, by focusing on the German poet Uljana Wolf, who has traversed the language barriers between English, German, Polish, and Belarusian in conceptually and linguistically innovative ways in her multilingual and politically engaged poetry and poetics. The chapter argues that Wolf’s work criticises national and linguistic borders and ‘mother tongues’ both thematically and poetically, i.e. by way of neologisms, unusual syntax and prefixes, and by splicing a number of languages into the texture and prosody of what Wolf calls her ‘other-tongued’ German poetry. Such an approach to multi- and translingualism as a formal feature with political stakes and a concomitant rejection of an idealised originality, the chapter goes on to argue, also invites a similarly rigorous playfulness and multilingual alertness from a translator. Suggesting that translation is generative and dialogic, in its ability to forge conversations and transnational communities, Wolf’s experimental translational practice is contextualised by reference to other innovative English-language and translingual poets, such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, M. NourbeSe Philip, and to the recent critical writing and anthologies of translation and anti-colonial discourses. In conclusion, the chapter argues that Wolf, along with these thinkers and poets, helps readers reconceive translation as a radically inventive and collaborative practice that complicates access to the ‘foreign’ it is usually supposed to facilitate.