AN EVENT OF THE POETRY FESTIVAL BERLIN 2019

With the writers Don Mee Choi (South Korea & USA) | LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (USA) | Johannes Göransson (Sweden & USA) | Sawako Nakayasu (Japan & USA) | Urayoán Noel (Puerto Rico & USA)

Concept and presenters: Christian Hawkey (USA) poet and Villa Fellow Uljana Wolf (Germany) poet

What does translingual writing do to our perception and our understanding? What spaces does it open up for non-understanding and what happens there? Can it be translated at all? Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey have invited five writers who have for years been inspiring their own writing and translation co-praxis, and now they will be presenting their texts as sound installation, performance, reading or collage.

The common points of reference for the five poets are the USA and the hegemony of the English language. All five interrogate and perforate its dominance systems with the radiant power of freefraying vectors from the whole world – until English opens its Babylonian reservoirs and gives access to Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Maori, Hindi and Swahili. This way the individual languages do not stand as uncritical “Globabel”, firmly entrenched and walled in next to each other, but cut through each other in the field of tension of multiple unbelongings and transgressions. Translinguality is a political gesture of resistance, as an eavesdropped mix of languages, as a constantly repeatable translation process, as a language archipelago, as a media opening and as text events which produce “unstatements”. What happens in the room when everybody does not understand something? This is the evening for finding out.