Volume 07, Chapter 07 | May 2020

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Image from Getty Open Content Program

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Last month we launched our #dailyvisual project on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/) . We offer a new image every day and invite you to write 5-50 words in response (see below for a selection). It is a short, impulsive exercise designed to both cleanse the mind and entice new ideas.

The act of doing a daily call-and-response made us realise that Visual Verse is very much a pulse-taker. It is a record of events that have affected us all over the past seven years, and a collection of words that absorb our shared experiences. In that sense, we have created, together with you, a unique literary and historical artefact. It is our goal over the coming years to ensure that this publication is preserved, whether it be in print or catalogued digitally with the British Library. There is considerable work and cost involved and if you have any ideas that can help please contact our curator and Publisher, Kristen Harrison: (kristen@thecurvedhouse.com).

In the meantime, we continue to experience isolation with varying degrees of acceptance and anxiety. Whether you are trying to write, trying to read, finding it hard or easy, one thing is certain: you are not alone. Our glorious image this month is a mummy portrait (http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/8213/unknown-maker-mummy-portrait-of-a-youth-romano-egyptian-ad-150-200/) dated 150-200 AD, from Getty’s open content program. Since translation is what we are all doing these days, metaphorically speaking, we are very proud to bring you three of the world’s best literary translators, and thinkers about translation; all critically acclaimed writers in their own right.

Our first page is for Kate Briggs, a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, NL, where she teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute. She is the author of the extraordinary This Little Art (https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/this-little-art ) (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a long essay on the practice of literary translation informed by her own experiences of translating Roland Barthe’s last lecture courses. We love this book. It was a finalist for a Believer Book Award, and a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and The Paris Review: it is now being translated into five languages. She is working on a new book, an essayistic novel titled The Long Form, forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

On page two, we are very excited to publish Jennifer Croft, author of the moving Homesick (https://www.unnamedpress.com/books/book?title=Homesick) and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner, with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, of The International Booker Prize for Flights.

Our page three features Marilyn Booth who lived in Egypt for a number of years, and by coincidence, these portraits have long-fascinated her. She has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, most recently Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (https://www.sandstonepress.com/books/celestial-bodies ) , for which she and Alharthi jointly won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud. She is currently translating Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost, winner of the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and Jokha al-Harthi’s most recent novel, Narinjah: Bitter Orange. Marilyn tells us that many years ago she wrote a Dphil dissertation at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on a young Alexandrian poet exiled from Egypt in 1919. Now, she holds the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her scholarly interests
include gender history, Arabophone intellectual and literary history, historical translation studies, and vernacular writing. Recent scholarly books are Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History in fin-de-siècle Egypt and (as editor and contributor) Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean. Soon to be completed is Feminist thinking in fin-de-siècle Egypt: The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz.

So, dear readers, May is the month of speaking as if from centuries in the future. Words that might last thousands of years…

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

P.S. If you love this series, check out our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) where we have work from more leading writer/translators including Maureen Freely, Haider Shabaz, Sohini Basak, Jen Calleja and more…

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@jenniferlcroft (https://twitter.com/jenniferlcroft)
@FitzcarraldoEds (https://twitter.com/FitzcarraldoEds)
@sandstonepress (https://twitter.com/sandstonepress)
Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
Submit (https://visualverse.org/submit/)

** #DailyVisual
————————————————————
Join us every day on Instagram for a 15-minute, 5-50 word writing challenge.
Here is a selection of submissions from the past month.

Washed and refilled
the birdbath today.

Chaffinch arrived.
Took a drink.
Bathed.
Left behind
a rose-coloured feather.

Then crows.
Three of them.
Fighting.
Water level
dropped by half.

Then a pigeon.
Wings lifted for airing.
A tidal splash flooding
the tulips and
emptied the birdbath.
Another day unravelling.

by @miskybr (https://www.instagram.com/miskybr/)

The late afternoon is holding onto the day’s heat. The air smells like rosemary. They share an orange, cold from the fridge, fat segments of sunshine.

by @rach_is_reading (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/)

Today I opened my eyes, I saw the words I wanted to say shouting in my head, I set them free.

by @hazelmason4544 (https://www.instagram.com/hazelmason4544/)

It’s always the horse that dies
in wars
A noble death
for a noble beast
The men she served
share mournful
meaningful looks
and ride her spotted back one final time
from thundering craters and bloodied wire
to faraway fields and gentle hills
the memory of a sheltering roof
Home.

by @ (https://www.instagram.com/hazelmason4544/) bennybombdrop (https://www.instagram.com/bennybombdrop/)

We may applaud the cooperation; we may rebuke the crime; we often fail to understand the situation.

by @ (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/) georginaburtenshaw (https://www.instagram.com/georginaburtenshaw/)

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Volume 04, Chapter 01 | November 2016

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Image by Hernan Bas

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Happy Birthday! Visual Verse is three years old this month and we are thrilled to continue to grow this very special publication. We now have well over 1000 writers and readers getting this newsletter each month and we receive up to 150 submissions with each new issue. Over the last three years we have published writers from around the world – New Zealand to Scotland and Argentina to Japan. Some have been nominees (and even winners) of Bookers, Goldsmiths and Polari prizes. Some have gone on to publish debut novels and short story collections. We have championed big names and up-and-coming ones, from small presses and none – and every month we find our inbox stuffed full of the best, the freshest, the most exciting and radical writing from around the world. Today we celebrate Visual Verse as a platform for new writing, no matter where it comes from, and we celebrate you. Our writers who have made Visual Verse what it is.

A birthday for Visual Verse means the start of a brand new volume. Volume 04, Chapter 01 features Miami-born artist Hernan Bas (http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/hernan-bas) , the candle on our cake. His work is often inspired by stories, full of literary intrigue and tinged with nihilistic romanticism and old world imagery; he says his influences include Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysman. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His work is part of the permanent collections of New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

Hernan’s works are stories that unfold and Visual Verse is nothing if not an act of translation: the world and all its art transformed into words. This month we decided to go even more meta and lead with some fantastic writers who are also actual translators. For where would literature be without these multilingual multi-talents?

The icing our cake is a lead piece by Maureen Freely, the author of three works of non fiction and seven novels, including, most recently, Sailing through Byzantium, an elegy to the art of thinking in many languages. She is also the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and 20th century classics. Her translation with Alexander Dawe of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, was awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2014. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. As President of English PEN, she champions free expression worldwide. As the former chair of the Translators Association, she also works with campaigns aiming to promote world
literature in English translation. It’s wonderful to celebrate Visual Verse with her.

Our cake’s first layer comes from Cecilia Rossi, originally from Buenos Aires, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, where she now works as a Lecturer in Literature and Translation and convenes the MA in Literary Translation. Her original poetry has appeared in several journals including Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review. In 2010, her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Poems were published by Waterloo Press. In 2013 she won a British Academy Small Grant to undertake research into the Pizarnik Papers at Princeton University Library. Her latest translations of Pizarnik’s prose texts and excerpts from her journals appeared in Music and Literature No. 6.

The ganache is by Saskia Vogel (http://www.saskiavogel.com) , who has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, Sight & Sound, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.

And the final layer is by Jeffrey M. Angles, who has spent his life traveling back and forth between Japan, where he lived for many years, and the US, where he is a professor of Japanese literature and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers into English. He writes poetry in both English and Japanese, and his collection of Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizuke henkō sen (My International Date Line) was published by Shichōsha in 2016.

As an extra slice, if you want to hear more about the art of translating fiction, tune in to BBC Radio 3 on 24th November at 10pm when Preti will be picking some of the latest brilliant new books recently translated into English, and discussing them live.

Enjoy the flavours, dear writers, then get inspired, and send us presents we can share.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Kristen and Preti

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