Introduction to the Translating Language and Sound Issue

Translating Language and Sound is a hum, a light drone, a vibrating voice, a Song dynasty poem, an invitation to come on a walk; it’s an A-side, a B-side, it’s underwater. It’s being consumed by the material world, it’s an engagement with capitalist time, it’s the loss of self, it’s coming back to the self. It is waves and wind, a sharp flow, in and out, a black screen typing away, quickly the words fliting on the screen, letter by letter asking, “what takes the island from the girl?” 

I set out, with this issue, to highlight the performance and sound art of writers working both on and off the page, writers who cared about translating their work into a different medium, into music, sound, writers who thought of language as a living, breathing thing.  How does plucking the words off the page transform each pieces’ original intention?

What I received was far more than I could have hoped for and imagined. I’m so excited to share all the exciting, cool, and innovative pieces that were sent my way. These are works that explore time, space, islands, intense sound then pauses, that think about histories written and unwritten, that question the self and it’s physicality. Translating Language and Sound ended up being a conversation about place and land, about online and digital spaces and their connections to the material world, and each contributor translated their work into new spaces, participating in this sonic conversation. 

The contributors included in this vibrant issue are H Felix Chau Bradley, Jessie Perlstein, Benjamin de Boer, Yoyo Comay, Nicholas Hauck, Eddy Wang, Fan Wu, Ami Xherro, Melly Davidson, Yilin Wang, Vivian Li, Cason Sharpe, Natasha Ramoutar, and Kevin Ramroop. The issue also includes my interview with Whitney French, where we talk Hush Harbour and Speech Sounds, as well as Whitney’s own sonic project collaboration.

H Felix Chau Bradley and Jessie Perlstein transformed Chau Bradley’s short story, Personal Attention Roleplay, into ASMR sound art. Perlstein’s sonic intervention builds Chau Bradley’s already immersive and visual language. This new version throws the listener into deeper emotional depths as we ride an emotional rollercoaster alongside the main character, who delves deeper and deeper into the collective, but also into non-being. 

The Toronto Experimental Translation Collective (Benjamin de Boer, Yoyo Comay, Nicholas Hauck, Eddy Wang, Fan Wu, Ami Xherro) rendered Paul Celan’s poem “Musselheap” six ways, turning the original poem into a symphony of sounds, claps, clicks, piano notes, rain, and much more, concluding in a deep drone, absent of any distinguishable words or language, a deep, somehow comforting hum.

Using live coding and the software Hydra, Melly Davidson translated her poem, “Sandra, like a cuss” into a visual and sonic experience. She types the poem out line by line, the sounds of clicking in the background, often overwhelmed by music, by waves, by people talking and eating, by found audio off her phone from Jamaica. Davidson manages to bring us to the island, guides us along her poetic journey, with colour and text, with live recorded music, with the sound of her mother’s voice.

Yilin Wang and Vivian Li’s piece "Five Ways of Translating Li Qingzhao’s Poem《蝶恋花 - 晚止昌乐馆寄姊妹》” is a generous collaboration between the two translators, offering the reader four distinct ways of interpreting and engaging with Li Qingzhao's poem, showing us the reason behind different interpretive choices, bringing us along the translation journey. It is further translated in the Cipai Form as a Song by Vivian Li, which lifts the poem off the page, and renders it in a way it would have been presented during Qingzhao’s life.

Cason Sharpe’s piece is a walking tour of a part of Ishpadinnaa Street in Tkaronto, taking us to three spots, where Cason highlights lesser-known histories of a bench, a skating rink, and a wall, bringing them to life and asking the listener to wonder why they might have missed these histories. It’s an exercise in pausing and wondering, seeking histories both known and hidden. He also peppers the tour with his own personal history with the street having grown up in Toronto, giving the tour added life, the textures and sounds of the city in the background. 

Functioning as an A side and B side of a tape, Natasha Ramoutar and Kevin Ramroop audio collaboration sets Ramroop’s audio manipulations against Ramoutar’s poetry, one which considers the relationship between time and capitalism in the Caribbean, one which rethinks what constitutes an important use of time. Time in the Caribbean “was tightly managed to ensure African slaves and later South Asian indentured labourers were "productive" to create exports, and in turn wealth, for their colonizers. Therefore, tactics used to steal time back were extremely transgressive.” 

—Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Curator

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Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer living in Tio’tià:ke. Their book knot body (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize. The Good Arabs (2021), published by Metonymy Press, was the winner of the 2022 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and received an Honorable Mention from the 2022 Arab American Book Awards for the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, GUTS, carte blanche, the Shade Journal, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019.