The latter aspect is particularly intriguing. What indeed is Polyphonic? A collection of film-poems? An art collective? A “group poem,” as Nastac calls it? A cross-artform project? A text and video-based performance? Perhaps all of these things combined, while none of them literally. As (some) of the videos/film-poems are available online, the definitive “modus operandi” seems to be the live public event, with the project being consistently presented at a number of major festivals and venues, such as the London European Poetry Festival, the Brussels International Poetry Fest, Haus für Poesie Berlin, the Bucharest International Festival of Poetry, and StAnza International Poetry Festival in St Andrews.
Yet, in being so remarkably versatile and multifaceted, Polyphonic is actually far from being alone in either Romanian literary tradition or present-day culture. A red thread going (just as “Greater Romania”) as far back as the early twentieth-century avant-garde school Dada and its founding father Tristan Tzara, continues to this day with a vibrant performative literary scene. For indeed, over the past two decades, Romanian approaches ranging from cross-artform multimedia to slam and sound poetry to post-conceptual and feminist to neo-avant-garde to reading series and relational poetics to computational/(post)digital performance poetry have made waves both at home and abroad. Among all of the above, Polyphonic is still one of a kind, perhaps best described by visual artist Raluca Popa as “a way toward translation,” operating as a connector and converter between various languages and arts, media and modes, cultures and genres.
—MARGENTO
The polyphony of Polyphonic is more than just phonic. It is one of genres and media and languages, right? Why, and how?
Simona Nastac: You are absolutely right. The project was produced by the National Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest in 2018 to mark the Centenary of United Romania, celebrating its ethno-cultural diversity and the social cohesion among different communities. The nine participating poets are Romanian authors of different ethnic origins (Hungarian, German, Ukrainian, and Serbian), from different regions of the country (Transylvania, Banat, Bucovina, Bucharest), Chișinău (Republic of Moldova), and the diaspora. With the exception of Henriette Kemenes, the rest are Romanian-language writers, who also write in their first tongues and translate from these into Romanian and vice versa. The polyphony of languages and identities is further enhanced by the rich interplay between image and text, visual art and poetry, which echoes the ongoing synthesis between media initiated by the concrete poetry movement that continues in other art forms today and relates to what art theorist Rosalind Krauss has called the “post-medium condition”—an entwined helix of genres and modes of production that holds unending potential for contemporary creativity. Innovation happens at the intersection of ideas, disciplines, and cultures, and this was my primary aim as the curator of the project, together with the possibility of reaching new and diverse audiences for Romanian poetry and art.
Translation is involved in your project on a number of levels. The English translation of the poems run on the screen following the pace of the Romanian voiceover and/or of the animation, while the “originals” are in their turn (possible) translations. As all of the featured poets have non-Romanian ethnic backgrounds, even if/when writing in Romanian, some sort of cultural and potentially implicit or tacit linguistic translation may very likely be involved in their work. How do you work with that?
SN: Indeed, we know that translation is not simply a form of rewriting or refraction. Rather it shares characteristics with a much broader set of activities having to do with intracultural and intercultural interface and interchange. Polyphonic was conceived both as a live show and an exhibition or screening of the twenty videopoems. It was presented live in London, Brussels, Berlin, and Bucharest, with the poets performing in Romanian on stage in sync with the video projection. Occasionally, one could perceive subtle interferences from a ‘foreign’ language in their pronunciation or voice tone; in other cases, the poems actually include explicit references to different cultural origins and identities, such as the mention of the Transylvanian Saxon villages and community in Michael Astner’s verses, specific Ukrainian names in Matei Hutopila’s poems, the “made in Hungary” self-labelling of Andrei Dosa’s ‘sturdy body’, and the discerning distinction between Europeans and Moldovans in Victor Țvetov’s poetry. Another facet of this continuous transfer of concepts as well as words revealed itself even more visibly in the multilingual collective poem they performed at the end of the show. The poem was created during a workshop in Bucharest in March 2018, coordinated by poet and editor Claudiu Komartin, who also helped me to select the poets and the translators, and who presented the live events. Centred on the idea of food sharing, the poem was a melting pot in more than one way, to which each poet brought something from his or her own “kitchen”: languages, sounds, traditions, memories. Here is a short clip from this fusion feast: Polyphonic Workshop. It was one of my favourite times throughout the process, the fever of the interaction matching the discreet intensity of translation implicit in the individual work of the poets.
Besides the linguistic-literary translation, there is in Polyphonic a “translation” of poems (as in texts) into video and audio. Does that circle back onto the “initial” text of the poem? In Grass, for instance, the pace, or at times actually the delay, at which certain words in the English translation pop on the screen seems every now and then to work as a sort of video-based polysemic enjambment technique. Do you see your project as multimedially (re)reading/rewriting the selected poems?
Raluca Popa: I think animation for Polyphonic became an attempt to rigorously not work in a definite form. To not narrate, but to not compete with the text either. I had to constantly find a way toward translation because I had to think about animating another poem again. But I also had to determine for myself what I honestly like and stay with that and work toward that.
To not describe, this is sometimes difficult to avoid when working with text and visual material. I tried to counterbalance this tendency, because if this happens, this new “translation” circles back onto the initial text of the poem in a very damaging way. I have not always succeeded in avoiding that, but this was my intention nevertheless.
The animation for the poem Grass is composed of two simple gestures, walking and picking up flowers. It happened that, while I was working on the poem, a builder came to my studio to repair the existing damaged floor. I reluctantly asked him whether he would like to help me with some shooting, which I needed as a reference for the animation—the picking up of flowers, and to my surprise, he enthusiastically agreed. And through the screen of my camera, I saw him repeating this gesture a couple of times in a very simple and beautiful way, and the rhythm was set there and I kept it as it was in the subsequent drawn frames. I liked how these foreign gestures coming somehow from afar, converged into the poem, where they met other gestures and other rhythms carried by words. This is just an example, but there are many other examples of outside occurrences, materials, and temporalities that altered the work on the animations. The enjambment technique you mentioned, I think this is a nice way to frame the animations.
Some might perceive the video material as a (re)reading of the initial text, or as a giving-receiving of information, if the focus is on one single poem. But if seen in its totality, Polyphonic appears more like the result of a manifold number of exchanges, supplementations, substitutions among words and images, taking place inside the body of one single poem and, at the same time, circulating from one poem to another. Some animations are good, some are not so good. To experience some sort of indeterminacy, to draw tangents here and there, to place oneself at the intersection of document and fiction, these are interesting possibilities, positions in relation to Polyphonic.
There is an obvious political choice in featuring (only?) Romanian poets of non-Romanian heritages. What is the rationale behind it? And, are you going to stay the course for the future Polyphonic projects as well?
SN: Livia Ștefan and Claudiu Komartin (who joined the group poem) are of Romanian heritage. The choice reflected the values associated with the particular political and historical context I mentioned at the beginning: diversity, dialogue, solidarity, collaboration. They are, nevertheless, equally relevant for our global yet deeply divided world. Living in London, I have become even keener to actively promote them through my projects since Brexit; it's the least I can do.
Romanian literature has a strong performance poetry tradition fervently manifest nowadays as well. Do you relate to that fervent milieu in any way?
SN: I am, primarily, a visual art curator. Over the years I have worked with a wide range of art forms, but I started to curate live poetry events only in 2016, the first one marking the 100th anniversary of the emergence of Dada. I tried then to contextualize the experimental poetry of today in relation to its first expressions created by the authors of the historical avant-garde. The event was so successful that it became a constant feature of the Bucharest International Festival of Poetry. A subsequent event was inspired by Paul Klee’s quote “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Whether it is a line in poetry or drawing, I see it spiraling, morphing into texts and books, graphics and typography, maps and topography, collages/assemblages and objects, music and sound, still and moving images, a line made by walking, a picket line and lines of code. I like to think that this is my main contribution to the developments you rightly describe. Cross-pollination enhancing the potential of the poetic voice to re-enchant the world.
