Leanne Bridgewater – The Homophone Translator
Leanne Bridewater has a new publication, out now as free PDF and as mp3 on the ever interesting Beard of Bees. Leanne’s zimZalla object (catalogue number 018) is Alternative Anniversaries.
“I realised I could use the sounds of a Polish man speaking to write poetry in English. This was the seed of the idea of The Homophone Translator. As a basis for the translation project, I wrote a short story, Silver Linear Cloud, in English. Then, I asked several competent translators to translate one or more of the nine sections of the story into other languages. I provided recordings of the English sections and they returned recordings of their language translation.
Once I received the foreign language translations, I “homophonically” translate the recorded words back into English. To do this, I listened to the sounds repeatedly until English words or sounds emerged I was interested in the process of constructing new poems, being inspired by sounds, rather than following the stereotypical path of seeing translation as an accurate transportation of meaning.”
Alternative Anniversaries
zimZalla object 018 is Alternative Anniversaries by Leanne Bridgewater, a set of 10 greetings cards to mark those key dates in your calendar. Click here for more information, including how to buy.
PoeTea responses: Angela Keaton
PoeTea responses: Urusula Hurley
Object 017 now available
zimZalla object 017 is Pomegranates in the Oak, a sound collage CD with discovered and manipulated text by Alison Gibb and text and sound treatments by Tom Jenks.
The object’s primary text is Virginia Andrews’ 1979 novel Flowers in the Attic, from which Gibb, using instinctive selection and placement, has created a second text. This second text was then replicated sonically using spoken recordings by Gibb of the relevant sections of the original novel, with selected words and phrases isolated and spliced in order, preserving uneven and disjunctive patterns of tone and stress. This sonic collage was then fed through speech to text software to create a third, shadow text, which was recorded and added as a layer to the first track. Finally, a selection of samples, suggested by the hybrid text, were added, with some distortion.
Click here for a sample and here for the project page, which includes links to buy a CD for £3 in the UK or £5 elsewhere.
PoeTea responses: Bobby Parker
This has been posted before, but for completeness and context is being posted again.
This week’s response to Jo Langton’s PoeTea project is from Bobby Parker, who was allocated the Black blend. Ten writers and artists were invited to respond to one of the ten varieties. These are being published weekly on this site. See here for a list of those published so far.
a cut-throat adventure in interactive poetics
“I knew that something strange was going on when one of my companions left the room, opened the front door, and screamed as loudly as she could before sitting back down. It’s not the kind of thing that I associate with reading poetry – but then A never ending poem read with dice that goes on to explore the possibilities of human intervention within the context & illusion of chance, ‘a fully playable board game which generates multiple aleatory readings of poem text fragments’, is probably quite far from most people’s idea of a poem.”
Anthony Adler reviews zimZalla object 014 here.
