Making Sense

Making Sense is the third project of the collaborative series Passages of Babel

After Arise by Any Other Name with Samuel Mignot and A Comme Babel with Guillaume Métayer, I was still reflecting on George Steiner’s famous 1991 call to poets in After Babel. Another powerful inspiration was the remarkable work of Barbara Cassin on translation, from the the Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles project to the MUCEM exhibit, many books and essays, and the Maisons de la Sagesse, a non for profit organization focused on translation as a skill for dealing with differences. Following these two visionaries, I reached out to poets/translators.

I am immensely grateful to the thirteen award-winning poets/translators who answered the call and wrote a text inspired by the word

sense

as defined in the Dictionnaire des Intraduisibles - Dictionary of Untranslatables

The authors of Making Sense invite you to discover the magnificent mysteries and difficulties of translation. The journey of taking one text from one language to another is perilous, especially if you translate poetry. It seems impossible. It is never ending. It is essential to our understanding of each other. It is a work of art. There are multiple metaphors to describe the difficult creative act of translation. But the image that keeps coming back and best connects language and translation is Keijiro Suga’s:

“a language is like an island constantly changing its shape, whose coastline is being washed by the incessantly approaching and breaking waves from many other languages”

The poets of Babel constantly navigate from island to island. They travel and they help us travel from one island to the other. Listening to their recordings, you may catch a glimpse of the music in their heads and the complexities of translation.

"After Babel aspires to reach philosophers of language, historians of ideas, scholars of poetics and the arts and of music, linguists, and, most obviously, translators. But it solicits the interest and pleasure of the general reader, of all those who love language, who experience language as formative of their humanity. Above all, it addresses itself, in hope of response, to poets. Which is to say to anyone who makes language live and who knows that the affair at Babel was both a disaster and—this being the etymology of the word ‘disaster’—a rain of stars upon man." George Steiner

Listen to the Passages

• Marina Skalova - De la traduction d'un poème
• Sabine Huynh - YÁ'AASH
• Laura Cesarco Eglin - Letting Words Come Inside Me
• Andreas Unterweger - Reading Diary
• Forrest Gander - Why Translation
• Pierre Vinclair - La Boucle du Sens
• Guillaume Métayer - Taste of Cherry
• Eugene Ostashevsky - Ces Sons Sont Sans Sens
• Ottilie Mulzet - Meanings