Mariusz Pisarski

This article discusses the challenges of translating poetry generators in multi-authorial, creative collaborations and within the context of understanding text as a process. Stephanie Strickland’s and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might be considered an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one-syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic, kennings have different morphological, lexical, and grammatical arrangements, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the JavaScript code, instructions that accompany the JavaScript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, needed to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forced us to modify the code.

In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to JavaScript), which combines them in almost countless ways. Such a collision of cultures, languages, and tools becomes amplified when transposed into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and ourselves, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.

Translated by the Authors

Cultural and methodological framework set by digital humanities implies a substantial shift in authorial paradigms. A sole humanist thinker is replaced by a humanist-programmer, always ready for collaboration with others and whose research is focused not on close-reading and interpretation, but on computational and generative distance-reading. One of the ways to familiarise with the changed paradigm is to look for similar, authorial figures in art, specifically in digital literature. The humanist-programmer, someone with higher than usual set of competencies which spanned across computing and literature, has been directly and indirectly present in the work of Nick Montfort – one of the most prolific artists in the field of electronic literature. By looking at the occurrences of the writer-programmer figure in Montfort’s literary happenings and text-machines and by examining the enhanced model of literary communication, the article aims at encouraging new ways of looking at (digitally) infused literature and culture, establishing Nick Montfort as one of their pioneers and proponents. Part of the article, while discussing a poetry generator Sea and Spar Between, concentrates on several categories related to the figure of humanist-programmer: critical code studies, distributive authorship, culture of collaboration, remix culture.