What is Experimental Translation? This workshop will explore this emerging field of writing, introducing the ideas that motivate the act, exploring a variety of techniques, and giving attendees tools to develop their own experimental translation.

This practice emerges from an often overlooked but essential fact that something is always lost in a translation. Whether it is the sound of the words on the tongue, or the specific local meaning of the words in their original context, idioms or allusions or tone and style, something always disappears in a translation. The richness of words and their connotative resonances are by necessity flattened, erased, or irrevocably distorted when brought across a linguistic divide. Thus, the spirit of the text changes over time, between readers, against whatever motivating intentions the author might have pursued.

Instead of lamenting that loss, or merely ignoring it, this field capitalises on those losses and uses new tools to explore the very limits of meaning making in poetry. As a result, experimental translations always expose or discover something new and overlooked in the original text that could only be uncovered by that specific method.

There is no need for any second language in this workshop. We will focus on “homolinguistic translations”, which is to say translations of English books into English. We will consider a variety of efforts, particularly various experiments with translating William Shakespeare’s sonnets. Let us push deeper into experimental methods of translation to uncover new and unexpected properties of familiar texts.

Gregory Betts is an experimental poet based in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He is the Literary Arts Residency Lead at the SETI Institute and curator of bpNichol.ca. He is the author or editor of 23 books and teaches at Brock University.

Presented in partnership with UCD’s School of English and The Mary Lavin Centre for Creative Writing.