Review article: Translation, Creativity and Experimentalism

Tong King Lee's Translation as Experimentalism: Exploring Play in Poetics introduces us to concrete Chinese poetry and its translation; Delphine Grass' Translation as Creative-Critical Practice insists on the link between theory and practice and Alexandra's Lukes' edited volume Translating the Avant-Garde, Avant-Garde Translation wants to answer several questions: What is avant-garde translation?Why should we pay attention to it?And why now?The five volumes offer a creative approach to traditional ideas on translation.Grass argues for an experimental, bodily translation, in which translating is seen as a poetic and political task, which highlights openness, variation, a vast patchwork of impulses of a diverse range of cultural, physical and emotional reaches.In her book she integrates theory and practice with autobiography, the body, and other subjective modes.Lee foregrounds an open-ended, experiential translation that focuses on memes rather than signs and adds value to the original through verbal and nonverbal resources.His ludic translation offers a brilliant methodology to approach apparently untranslatable writing like concrete poems, and deconstructs traditional assumptions about translation.It can be seen as a site for raising questions of representation and for understanding translation not as the mere reproduction of an original but as a Deleuzean map where the translator's voice must also be heard.In her edited volume, Lukes invites the various contributors to challenge the role and limits of translation, to destabilize such concepts as authorship, primary and secondary, and also the very notion of translation.From different perspectives, the chapters show the reader the possibilities of the experimental and the avant-garde through translation seen as a dynamic process.The volume shows translation as a mobile, creative process and reveals "the extent to which the translator's 'readerly consciousness' […] comes into play during their (the translator's and the reader's) encounter with a text".Robert-Foley argues that experimental translation responds to the way translation happens in the algorithmic marketplace of languages, in order to oppose, respond, critique interrogate and try to understand that it is operating as a device for interrogating and challenging marketplace norms and practices of translation.In the age of algorithmic production, this seems mostly to happen between spoken human languages with writing systems.Robinson, for his part, celebrates experimental translation through the hypercyborg translator, the collage translator, the smuggler translator, and the heteronymous translator.A translation is totally different from any binary, predetermined, and unmoveable truth.