Translation Experiments

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From http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/syllabi/transl.html

Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else’s then your own) and translate it “English to English” by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or “free” translation as response to each phrase or sentence.

Homophonic translation: Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate the sound of the poem into English (i.e. French “blanc” to blank or “toute” to toot). (Cf.: Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s Catullus.) (Rewrite to suit?)

Take one of your response papers, or a found/selected text, and translate it into a half-dozen different critical/methodological styles.

Lexical translation: Take a poem in a foreign language that you can pronounce but not necessarily understand and translate it word for word with the help of a bilingual dictionary. (Rewrite to suit?)

Acrostic Chance. Pick a book at random and use title as acrostic key phrase. For each letter of key phrase go to page number in book that corresponds (a=1, z=26) and copy as first line of poem from the first word that begins with that letter to end of line or sentence. Continue through all key letters, leaving stanza breaks to mark each new key word. (Cf.: Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak.) Variations include using author’s name as code for reading through her or his work, using your own or friend’s name, picking different kinds of books for this process, devising alternative acrostic procedures

Substitution (1): “Mad libs”. Take a poem (or other source text) and put blanks in place of three or four words in each line, noting the part of speech under each blank. Fill in the blanks being sure not to recall the original context.

Substitution (2): “7 up or down”. Take a poem or other, possibly well\x{00AD}known, text and substitute another word for every noun, adjective, adverb, and verb; determine the substitute word by looking up the index work in the dictionary and going 7 up or down, or one more, until you get a syntactically suitable replacement. (Cf.: Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin, On the Pumice of Morons.)

Substitution (3): “Find and replace”. Systematically replace one word in a source text with another word or string of words. Perform this operation serially with the same source text, increasing the number of words in the replace string.

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