Vertaallab is een serie op Ooteoote die dichters uit andere taalgebieden aan de lezer voorstelt. Elke aflevering minstens één gedicht. Dat u mag vertalen, als u wilt. Graag zelfs, wat ons betreft. Post uw vertaling van onderstaand gedicht als reactie op dit bericht.

TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is ontstaan uit een interactieve tekstgenerator op J.R. Carpenter’s website Lucky Soap. Deze generator vormt een narratieve dialoog onder bepaalde randvoorwaarden steeds opnieuw uit content van het internet. Carpenter programmeerde de generator eerst in Python en vertaalde haar vervolgens naar JavaScript in 2011. Het script werd voor het eerst door de dichter live uitgevoerd en voorgelezen in het kader van de conferentie Digital Poetics and the Present, Universiteit van Amsterdam (curatoren: Yra van Dijk, Marije Koens), Perdu, 10 december 2011.

Carpenter: “Every text we read on the web is always read in translation. The web-browser translates source code into the text we see on the screen. In the case of TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], the web-browser translates the JavaScript source code into another script of sorts, to be performed in three voices: Strophe, Antistrophe, and Chorus.

Whether read by the eye in a fixed or a generative digital instantiation, or experienced by the ear as live voice, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is a text about the translation from one place to another. Through generations of transatlantic migration, characteristics of one place become transposed upon another.”

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TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]

Begin Transmission.
How?
With a question.
What emerges from a suggestion?
Foreign headlands, to torment us.
Winter fog on the bay.
Have the critical arguments been weighed yet?
The translator transmits her warnings.
Why can’t the travellers request additional documents?
A few of them endured eighteen months.
Energy levels ran low, or so the reports seem to relay.
How did the navigator broadcast her details of recent crossings?
The telegraphic switch won’t register these intermittent murmurs.
Might the operator thus come to identify this inlet?
The passage from the New World proved trying.
Conditions have been unreadable.
Receiving wavering interference, some static…
Who can remember the sea in mist like this?
Some parts of the author’s research findings will be documented.
Should surveyors now leave behind these bays?
16th-century merchants traced maps.
Eleven were from England.
Why is it that the authorities always seem to erase items from the records?
Ship-to-shore delivery mechanisms take seasons to indicate the required scripts.
Have the experts attempted to write?
Instructions were air mailed hours ago.
There may have been warning.
Encrypted whines, ships on the horizon.
A vibration, no signals received, probably not sending…
Did anyone else locate that pattern?
Far systems have corresponded.
One refugee implores the administrator.
Which words of encouragement could he demonstrate?
Genealogist’s records of foreign shores repeatedly develop from these edges.
May 17th-century castaways’ descendents require extra proof from us?
Hypothetically, but by autumn certain directions would be incorrect.
Why was the nearest horizon ordered?
The furthest views resemble those of home.
In these uncanny plans, the bay is regularly glowing.
Come to think of it… does that articulate earlier propositions?
Omens of exotic gales emerge on the meter.
Is the relay station humming?
Some suspect it’s on.
Please try again.

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J.R. Carpenter is een Canadese dichter en pionier op het gebied van plattegronden, webzines en niet-lineaire hypermedia objecten.
Ze studeerde Live Drawing and Anatomy aan de Students League te New York en Fibres and Sculpture aan de Universiteit van Montréal.
Al sinds 1993 gebruikt ze het internet voor de creatie en verspreiding van experimentele teksten. Haar elektronische literatuur werd gepresenteerd in musea en galeries en tijdens conferenties en festivals.
Haar pubicaties zijn Words the Dog Knows (Conundrum Press, 2008) en GENERATION[S} (Traumawien, 2011). Ze ontving talrijke onderscheidingen, waaronder de Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book voor haar debuut.
Een retrospectief van haar werk zal in juni 2012 te zien zijn tijdens Electrifying Literature in het kader van de Electronic Literature Organization Conferentie in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Carpenter woont in South-Devon, Engeland.