&Now 2019 Conference

This panel examines the convergence between practices of performance and practices of translation. We propose a broad definition of translation: including rewriting, adaptation, embodiment, and finally performance itself. We propose an equally broad definition of performance, including marginal acts, like the conversations between poets and translators, and liminal, hybrid genres, like Poets Theater. Is translation itself a kind of performance, a choreography of exchange? And is performance inextricable from translation—from the body as it moves through historical, political, and linguistic space? In our presentations we will focus on limit cases, exceptional practices that challenge the boundaries of both translation and performance. Toby Altman will examine Aimé Cesaire’s Une Tempête, a translation and revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, looking at the way in which translation offers a resource for reformulating the logistics of colonial time—and thinking more broadly about the way Poets Theater challenges colonial paradigms of authorship and performance. Corina Copp will discuss her recent translation of Chantal Akerman’s only play, Night Lobby (1992), using Akerman’s conception of "elsewhere” to explore how the adaptive, unfounded spaces that translation and performance make possible in this work are crucial for an anticolonial poetic theater. Benjamin Krusling will investigate Amiri Baraka’s eulogy for his sister Kimako alongside Greek tragedies from Sophocles and Aeschylus, thinking about the performance and translation of pain as it moves from the private to the public, splitting genres apart and renewing and (re-)establishing politico-cultural values. Bianca Rae Messinger will look at the work of Marguerite Duras, Tracie Morris, Bernadette Mayer and the late Argentine poet Leonidas Lamborghini, thinking through translation as a performative and a generative object and asking where the act of translation begins and where it ends—if, in fact, it does.