“What is language if it is not sound?”—Trần Thị NgH
Speaking of translation in one of the pre-recorded sessions of the poetic showcase Ù Ơ | SUO, writer Trần Thị NgH reminded the audience of the importance of sound in language. Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.
This focus on sound and other sensory aspects of poetry permeated the week-long Ù Ơ | SUO, which brought together poems in translation and multilingual works mixing Welsh, English, and Vietnamese, as well as panel discussions and visual and performative responses. This collaborative work was the result of a three-month residency for Welsh and Vietnamese women and non-binary writers.
Ù Ơ | SUO’s point of departure, according to Nhã Thuyên’s introduction, was the “familiar sounds of lullabies” and how they might serve as a clue to the “origins of poetic language and the role of women in transmission of language and memory within families.” The title of the showcase, which refers to the act of singing a lullaby, inspired me to experience this showcase through the dialectal metaphor of “bercer un poème“: cradling a poem as a mother would a crying child. The reader is also important to the “growth” of the piece: reading is how we cradle a poem. Nous sommes bercés par le poème, et nous berçons le poème—we are cradled by the poem, and we cradle the poem.
As I viewed the exhibition, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development came to mind. His theory deals with the nature of knowledge: how a child comes to acquire it, build it, and use it. According to Piaget’s framework, children go from experiencing the world through actions, to learning how to represent it through words, to expanding their logical thinking and reasoning. It isn’t that children know less, Piaget argued; they just think differently. This thinking “differently” is then a space where creative potential can emerge.
In the first two years of life, thought Piaget, a child develops its sensory and motor abilities, including its ability to walk. Incidentally, the first piece to be showcased was “walking lines,” a collaboration between all members that responded to Lan Anh’s work during the residency. In the video, each member takes a walk in a different setting whilst reading out a poem written in one of the three languages of the exhibition. Each walk embeds the written component into movement, creating static-poem, swift-poem, muddy-poem. This linking of words with motion was reminiscent of de Certeau’s idea that “the act of walking is to the urban system what speech is to language or to the statement uttered,” which suggests that in our movement, in our footsteps, we are already narrating, even if we don’t know it.
Similarly, Yên’s “a durational poem with four (un)bearable steps | một bài thơ chùng chình gồm bốn bước dùng dằng,” which is structured as a how-to guide, suggests that poetry need not be constrained by the written word. During the reading session, they commented that this piece is not so much a poem in that it can’t quite be read—Yên’s preferred method of experiencing the text is not by reading but by acting it out since as an artist they work primarily with video. Yet if we take up de Certeau’s walking linguistics and understand that there are poetic things outside of language, the camera movement in Yên’s accompanying video becomes a poetic medium in and of itself. The video begins with a reading of parts of the poem modulated by a voice changer whilst the image switches between a disco ball and chairs. Taking advantage of the natural echo that occurs in large spaces, the camera takes us on a twirl of sound before transitioning into still shots without voiceover and finally into a CCTV view. These visual transitions narrate the four steps in the poem without verbalising them and turn the poetry reader into a poetry watcher. The idea of surveillance evoked in that last act, for its part, turns our gaze almost into the pen that writes the visible movements into a coherent story.
The relationship between sound, verbalisation and meaning can be seen in “Bà Nain Mamgu Nana,” a collaborative work by Lan Anh, Rae Howell, Rhiannon Oliver, and Ness Owens. A patchwork of responses along with the original, from Welsh poets to Lan Anh’s “Hunched grandma goes to the market.” The piece weaves together three languages and four different speakers, each colour coded, in a tapestry of market stories centred on grandmothers and old women. In the opening line, “Bà Nain Mamgu Nana Nain Nanny Bà Mam Nain Bà Nana,” the repetition of sounds creates almost a babbling effect as the speaker renders the word “grandmother” in different ways. Each rephrasing has a slightly different connotation, moving from a general term for an old lady to a more intimate name for someone from one’s own family. In this way, the line seems to capture something akin to an epiphany, a feeling of when you are finally able to pinpoint something, and thus turns the babbling into naming. The speakers’ attempt to figure out who this “Bà Nain Mamgu Nana” is also becomes an investigation into the value—such as the musicality of language—that poetry can have beyond semantic meaning. This idea is also reflected in the showcase’s accompanying publication, in which the first grouping of poems is titled ‘sound’. Indeed, one note of appreciation often echoed by the contributors during the showcase’s accompanying events was gratitude for being able to hear others’ voices.
“Colour Exchange,” a collaboration between Phạm Thu Uyên and Howell, explores poems in different hues, looking at how people in two separate cultures name and associate meaning with various shades. For instance, blue in Vietnamese is “màu da trời,” which a literal translation would render as “skin of sky,” a notion that Howells keeps in her poem “To Visit Vietnam | I Ymweld â Fietnam | Đến thăm Việt Nam”:
blue = sad = yellow = happy = blue
so many colours under the sky’s skin
But the relationship between colours and words is not rigid, as the sequence of equations above hints at; Howell once remarked during a reading that yellow in Welsh often means happiness, while in Vietnam it can be read as a nostalgic colour. This instability between the signifying pigment and the signified emotion was evoked again when Howell, who has synaesthesia, tried to back-translate the poem. As she later recounted, she could no longer recall exactly how the colour associations came about. In a pre-recorded introductory video, she emphasised that this translation relied a great deal on the in-the-moment experience of a poem, an experience that resists the fixture of history.
Visual poetry is also explored in Ellyst Angharad Lewis’s responses to Thu Uyên’s poems, which made use of the (in)famous GoogleTranslate. Like a child breaking the social rules of language while learning them, the mechanical, out-of-context usage of words allows us to see language in a new light. In “in between: a short conversation about translation,” Lewis talked about how, when trying to translate Thu Uyên’s Vietnamese poem, GoogleTranslate helped her to bridge the gaps when she didn’t know what was going on. The programme allowed her to focus on the aesthetic part of the language and indulge in the awkwardness of misunderstanding.
A poem in translation is like a growing child expanding their capacity for understanding and abstract reasoning. However, this translation does not have to be, as Lawrence Venuti put it, “invisible.” Instead, translations may seek to make their status clear. The literary voice here is not one but multiple, just as traces of one’s growth and experiences are inscribed onto one’s skin. I was reminded of this when reading Thu Uyên’s “Tiếng đất lạ | Iaith Gwlad Dieithr,” which captures the rocky growth of a Vietnamese language that has traveled between English and Welsh, as is evident from the inclusion of foreign words and syntax:
tôi bước
bước tôi
bướ c
Inverting the Vietnamese subject-verb word order to mirror Welsh’s verb-subject order positions the motion forward as the centrepiece of the clause. This is emphasised even further in the next line, which only contains the verb “bướ c,” meaning “to walk” or “to step.” In this way, Thu Uyên marks her language as having travelled across land and sea.
If some poems in the showcase focused more on the poem’s growth, others addressed how to nurture the words of a poem themselves. Nguyễn Lâm Thảo Thi’s poem “ôm chữ thở | hold a word, breathes” remind us that words are heavy and should be used carefully, a consideration that is embedded in the back-and-forth movement of the lineation and can be read almost as an act of rocking:
. . . hold a word, breathes from the opening of the chest
like singing, worn out on the skin
clogged up in waterbreathes a mother’s lullaby
a rumbling twang . . .
The multitude of things a breath or word can hold is also explored in Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên’s “New Year Postcard | Bưu Thiệp Năm Mới”:
Sitting breath
Reclining breath
Somersaulting breath
Crying every Monday on your way to work then lying “dewdrops fell in my
eyes” breath
Here, the repetition of “breath” reminds one of the weight of life, yet at the same time it builds excitement, as if each “breath” weighed us down only to give us the pull needed to bounce back up into life, as suggested by the transition from the static act of “sitting” to the dynamism of “somersaulting.”
This yearning drives us into the future, a drive echoed in Oliver’s “Canu Caneuon | Singing Songs.” The poem was inspired by the hopeful feeling Oliver felt at seeing her daughter singing along in Welsh for the first time, a language the poet herself is relearning. Thus, if the Welsh language here embodies a future place, then the translation from the original English into Welsh symbolises forward movement:
. . . but my future is there in a new language,
crawling closer, calling to my past, my home,
singing songs across time,
bringing music to our bones.
Going back to the goal set out in the showcase’s introduction—that of searching for the “origins of poetic language”—Lan Anh’s “There is: a poem | Mae yna: cerdd” delves into the foundation of how we perceive and use language:
. . . a dislocated body
a vietnamese woman or a woman vietnamese
which is adjective? which is noun?
a queer woman or a woman queer
which is noun? which is adjective? . . .
Here, Lan Anh asks us to rethink how we conceive of the grammatical functions of words: to see “woman” as an attribute rather than a state and to see “queer” as a state rather than an attribute. Such changes force viewers to consider how categorisations affect our perceptions. This point of language usage affecting how we think is explored in Ness Owen’s “Notes on a Vowel Hungry Language,” in which she broaches the broader topic of language as a medium through which we construct the world.
What is language more
than a window to a world,
a lullaby to ear, a scissors to
cut, vibration stuck in throat?
In positioning language as “a window to a world,” the poem posits language as the foundation for world-building. Indeed, many aspects of our lives are mediated by language, such as our thoughts and feelings. Our language practice is a way for us to inhabit the world. This renders all the more important the act of taking care of language, to echo Lâm Thảo Thi’s poem–not by policing it but by guiding and nurturing it.
This poetic showcase, through all its experimental forms and ideas, showed that poetry and translation in a sense can make us all children again. They make us wonder at the world anew while simultaneously reconstructing it. Through discussions broadcast during the showcase, the poets of Ù Ơ | SUO demonstrated how poetry can be like a mother to whom we run when we are afraid, as well as how we are mothers to poetry, taking care of it and watching it grow. In the words of Menna Elfyn, “Poetry is a translation which enlarges our perception.”
Phuong Anh is a writer and editor at the youth- and BIPOC-run magazine GENCONTROLZ. At the moment she is a BA language and culture student at University College London, studying Italian and Japanese alongside cultural studies.
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