Monika Górska-Olesińska

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

On “Borrowing” Readers/Users Bodies for Immersion into the (Not Only Literary) Memory Spaces

The aim of this article is to study (mainly but not only) literary works that “borrow” users/readers bodies in order to create immersive memory spaces, i.e. that engage haptic interactions with texts as the sine qua non of entering the narrated story-worlds. To depict the broader context authors characterize the general strategy of immersion based on haptic experience of the work (metaphorically described as “borrowing of the user’s body”), seen in various media and different forms of storytelling, from traditional literary second person narratives to VR/XR experiences. Then authors focus on two e-literary examples (WuWu&Co and Maginary) in order to analyse how the reader’s gestures or his/her whole body can be incorporated into the act of reading. The purpose of introducing aforementioned case-studies is to point out the importance of elaborating actual discussions on haptic poetics of e-literary works. The paper ends with a close reading of Pry (by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro), the case study that provides a perfect example of “borrowing e-reader’s body” in order to immerse him/her in the memory space that is co-created by the protagonist’s memories and the reader’s gestures.

Co-creating and Co-experiencing Memory. Participatory and Embodied Experience of Queerskins: A Love Story by Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski

The aim of this article is to discuss the award-winning project by Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski – Queerskins: A Love Story (2018) that anchors virtual reality experience in a physical, interactive, immersive installation. The author will focus on both the virtual reality haptic experience for Oculus Rift with Touch controllers, as well as the experience of site specific installation, in order to examine visitors emotional and cognitive engagement with the story of semi-fictional protagonist Sebastian, young gay physician who died of AIDS. A theoretical framework for this analysis will be outlined, including the concept of kinesthetic empathy, as well as Sara Ahmed’s insights from Queer Phenomenology on the significance of the objects as signs of orientation.

Zespół redakcyjny „Przeglądu Kulturoznawczego” nie narzucał jednoznacznej formuły rozumienia pojęcia „trans-literatura”. Autorzy tekstów wchodzących w skład tego numeru prezentują różne punkty widzenia, przedmiotem swych rozważań czyniąc w głównej mierze zjawiska artystyczne.

Texton Telling. Distributed Translation Based on Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between Generator (2010)

The article presents challenges of translating poetry generators in multi-authorial, creative collaboration and within the context of understanding text as process. Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might seem 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 arrangement, 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. This collision of cultures, languages, and tools becomes amplified if one wants to transpose it 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 us, 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.