“Bless thee, Bottom … Thou Art translated!”: A Workshop on Poetry Across the Disciplines

Robert Frost famously defined poetry as that which is lost in translation. But what happens when poetry is translated not between languages but from the page to the voice? Or from one voice to another? What is lost? What is gained? In this workshop we will experiment with these sorts of translation, passing our poems from one form into another, from one voice to another. (How do you hear your poem differently when you read it aloud? When someone else reads it aloud? When you imagine it’s in the voice of a queen, or a fool, or a tow-truck driver, or a unicorn …) We will talk about and experiment with contrafactum — the practice of devising new words for old tunes. Participants should come prepared with a poem by someone else that they would like to experiment with; they should also expect to do some writing of their own. Introduced by Barb Carter