The Toronto Experimental Translation Collective (Benjamin de Boer, Yoyo Comay, Nicholas Hauck, Eddy Wang, Fan Wu, Ami Xherro) began in autumn of 2020 on Artscape Gibraltar Point. What we thought would be a one-week affair has turned — by virtue of our shared perversions of language and drive to transgress normative forms — into a long-duration collaboration whose most recent fruits include HOT TUB, our debut album; and Untitled Country Album, a work-in-progress performance and album.

 

In this piece, we render Paul Celan’s poem “Musselheap” six ways:

 

Fan was clipped and clapped all over his body as he recited his version. A percussed body is a heap of bruised muscles, half-caught breaths, “pearl-piles, the shoutflail / amidst, tailing the fallow / waters to the defrosting-hearth.” 

 

Ben used a portable dictaphone to re-cord a sequence of words sourced from phonetic pronunciation guides strung together according to the most popular English translation of Celan’s original work.

 

Nick sat by The Ontarian Sea to perform an ice-cool translation subdued by waves and wind. Sharp flow, in and out audibility, language’s lost coordinates, these are the translator’s shorelined friends.

 

Eddy conducted a symphony of crows, mussels, salmon, clams, and seagulls to sing Celan’s poem. For accompaniment, he translated the letters of Celan’s poem into piano notes and secured a guest feature from the British Columbian rain and wind.

 

Ami’s is an underwater recording of all vowels excised from the poem and transcribed phonetically on staff paper. What remains is a guttural invocation into the shell of the mussel. The mussel responds: ah a ee ëdë.

 

Yoyo’s is a drone scrying off the flaking black shell of shimmering abalone, absent all save one neverending tone of constant ingress, the mussel swallowing itself like a throat negotiating its last blockage with fate ringing all the while in the ears. 

 

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Toronto Experimental Translation Collective (TETC) is Benjamin de Boer, Yoyo Comay, Nicholas Hauck, Eddy Wang, Fan Wu, Ami Xherro. Combining the formats of seminars, workshops, and performances, TETC renegotiates relationships within and across languages and media. The texts, recordings, and performances produced document our unlearning of prior assumptions around communication. These activities develop strategies for withdrawal from the instrumentalization of language systems. In addressing the hegemonic power of major languages, TETC brings to the fore language’s potential in play and protest.