Statement of Poetics

This collaborative project of “Transversions”—works that intersect with, subvert, and open up Paul Braffort’s constraint-based polyglot poems—takes as its starting point our translations of his Oulipo work. Our Transversions alternately mimic his form, explicate/include elements of the original that we could not work into the translation, and draw inspiration from his poems to craft work that reflects our own position and interests as twenty-first century writers. Our approach builds on that of poets and theorists Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, for whom translation stimulates creative experiment, and on the Brazilian concrete poets’ notion of transcreation, whereby every translation is always already a reinvention of the original. Each Transversion (as well as its pre-textual translation) is a collaboration, both between the two of us, and between our poems and Braffort’s.

As background, the French and English versions of My Hypertopes consist of twenty poems based on the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), in which each number is the sum of its two predecessors. Each poem is dedicated to a member of the Oulipo and contains other formal constraints, including alexandrine sonnets, paronomasia, and homophonic punning. The poems in the sequence that correspond to the Fibonacci numbers “program” the other poems by providing words or themes that must be used in them. For example, poem 9 contains words extracted from poems 1 and 8. The “forced” use of these words brings in an added comic or dream-like element as characters from one poem appear in unexpected places when ported into others (for example Cyrano is present alongside Robert Kennedy’s assassination).
 
We first started creating Transversions (as well as our direct English translations of My Hypertropes) because we were inspired by the complexity and depth of Braffort’s linguistic humor, in part because we both also individually write poems that engage the substance of language itself, reveling in the manifold associations, etymologies, homophones, and puns that freight our words. Amaranth’s manuscript Pomegranate-Eater is obsessed with language’s slipperiness and musicality. It contains a series of self portraits through conversations with fruit that draw on French, Spanish, Polish, and English to create homophones for their Hebrew names, engaging with the idioms that complicate her sense of meaning. Gabriela’s first book, Controlled Decay (Akashic Books, 2008), reflects her own polyglot background: having attended the French lycée growing up in Mexico City, and forged an identity in the art communities of New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico, her layered use of language and the book as Passe-partout reflect a peripatetic, hybrid lifestyle.

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