Writer, translator, musician Straw Timothy

Tongues

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

Tongues is the work of American writer, translator and musician Timmy Straw (myself) and Finnish-Palestinian actor, playwright and director Noora Dadu. It is a study of the lived experience of translation within different private, political and historical circumstances and across different art forms, including poetry, music, performance, video, and dance. Tongues will be realized as a performance that is portable not only across different physical venues – theaters, stages – but also across forms: we plan to eventually "translate" the performance of Tongues back into a set of texts and publish it as a book. In both the writing and eventual performance of Tongues, as well as its later re-translation into a book, I understand its formal iterations as proceeding by way of a sequence of staged metaphors – shipwreck, the seance, the funhouse, among others. These metaphors are linked by their particular ways of "refracting" translation and its manifold possibilities, and by their unique privileging of a dramatic situation that can embrace spectacle and at the same time involve and/or implicate the audience. As metaphors that contain their own literary, political and historical legacies, they also (I hope!) invite the play of accumulated meanings and ambiguities, and out of their linked energies, a narrative can emerge. Translation conditions the terms of our world together. Its processes and effects are everywhere: in law, migration, cartography, love, capital, in the making and reception of images. Translation is also, telescoping inward, our only means towards one another. If, for Paul Celan, a poem is a message in a bottle, then translation is surely the bottle, or the ocean – bringing (and changing) speech from one being to another across real and metaphorical distance. The necessity of translation makes available a field of possibility – a field between performer and audience, or text and reader, that Tongues sees as both its subject and its site.