Intimacies of the Ear: A Two-Day Creative Translation Workshop

This is a two-session workshop, meeting on Wednesday, October 14 and Wednesday, October 21.

Please note: The workshop does not meet between these dates. One registration includes both sessions.

Both sessions will be recorded and made available to registered participants for a limited time. The Session 1 recording will be available before Session 2.

Description

About the Workshop

Translation is made of encounters. It moves from one mouth to another; it vibrates in a vulnerable, mysterious relation to errancy and awareness. Words press together in darkness, then fling open to light, then close again.

In this two-session workshop, we invite poets, translators, visual artists, and curious makers of all levels to work in pairs, treating translation as a condition two people enter together—provisional, intimate, and sometimes deliberately led astray. Experimenting with translation approaches, making poems, images, scores and hybrid work, we will build on a small ecology of exchanged sounds, images, languages, errors, and illuminations, that belong fully to neither collaborator. 

What We Will Explore

Our laboratory will be the award-winning multilingual anthology The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra. 

Rather than reading its translations as finished products, we will enter its creative relationships from the inside: following the threads between Cecilia Vicuña and Rosa Alcalá; the shifting ground of language between Kazim Ali and Ananda Devi; the movement between Etel Adnan and Sarah Riggs’s languages and worlds; Amanda Lee Koe’s encounter with Yu Xiuhua; Valzhyna Mort and Polina Barskova's passionate grapplings with history and the sayable; and Kit Warren’s images, which seem to write in a script no language entirely claims. 

Drawing alongside these artists on Édouard Glissant’s errancy, Pierre Joris’s nomadic poetics, and the idea of translation as a reciprocity of care, we ask whether translation could become a model for creative partnership—and perhaps for how we meet what is foreign to us without "mastering," assimilating, or making it our own? 

Who is it for?

We welcome poets, translators and visual artists of all experiences to join us, and to reimagine translation otherwise. 

Workshop Materials

Award-Winning Anthology: The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra 

Each ticket registration includes an ebook version of the anthology.

You may choose the Workshop + Ebook option if you would like the ebook only. If you would like a physical copy of the book, please choose one of the two hardcover options based on where the book will be shipped.

• Workshop + FREE Ebook — $100 (Total value: $131.50)
• U.S. Participants: Workshop + Hardcover + FREE Ebook — $125 (Total value: $184)
• International Participants: Workshop + Hardcover + FREE Ebook — $140 (Total value: $184)

Shipping: U.S. shipping is included at no additional cost. International shipping is $15 and is included in the $140 International Participants ticket price.

If you select a ticket that includes the physical book, please register by Wednesday, September 30 to receive your hardcover by the start of the workshop.

Workshop Leaders

Kythe Maryam Heller

Kythe Heller is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar of comparative religion and philosophy whose work spans text, film, sound, performance, translation, and multimedia social practice. She holds a doctorate in the Study of Religion from Harvard University, with a secondary field in Art, Film, and Visual Studies–Critical Media Practice, as well as an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a B.A. in English Literature from Reed College. Her books include Firebird (Arrowsmith Press), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and the award-winning bilingual anthology The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra (Stenen Press), co-edited with Carolina Gómez-Montoya and recognized by the Independent Publisher Book Awards, PubWest Book Design Awards, IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, and Foreword INDIES. Her poetry and creative work have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Jacket2, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and The Southern Review, among other venues, while her scholarly writing on mysticism, poetics, the phenomenology of religious experience, sound, and contemporary art has appeared in Cambridge University Press volumes, the Akron Series in Experimental Poetics, Forecast Journal, Religious Studies Review, and the Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal. Her film, performance, and installation work has been presented across the United States and Canada, including at Symphony Space and Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room.

Heller has received fellowships, residencies, grants, and commissions from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. She has taught at Harvard University, Villanova University, and Bard College, where she serves on the faculty of the Language & Thinking Program. She is the founder and Creative Director of Vision Lab, an international institute for experimental artistic practice, contemplative inquiry, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Conceived as a laboratory for the future of the human spirit, Vision Lab brings artists, scholars, and practitioners into sustained collaboration across art, spirituality, social and ecological transformation, and pro-social technologies—cultivating forms of attention, inquiry, and creative practice responsive to the complexities of the present moment.

C. Gómez-Montoya

C. Gómez-Montoya is a writer, editor, translator and artist living in Paris. They teach courses in languages and writing at St. John’s University, the Young Writer’s Workshop, and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College. In 2023 they co-edited (with Kythe Heller) the multilingual anthology of poetry in translation, The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow/ El alma se mueve en la sombra for Stenen Press. They are also member of Éditions How to Become, an independent and collective queer feminist publisher based in Paris.