Home on the Move

Home on the Move is a multilingual anthology of contemporary poetry that explores and interrogates ideas of home, belonging and language from poetic perspectives. Featuring filmmakers, translators, artists and poets from Romania, Poland, France, Spain, the UK, Iraq, Germany and Italy, Home on the Move explores notions of ‘home’ that are challenged and reshaped by unprecedented migration. The creative responses are the results of a journey undertaken by two poems about ‘home’: TS Eliot Prize shortlisted Deryn Rees-Jones’ poem travelled from the UK via France to Spain and back whilst Polish poet Rafał Gawin’s travelled to the UK via Romania and back to Poland. These poems reflect the inspiration of the places they visited. During each journey, the poems were translated by a literary translator and a local film artist. The poems and their literary and artistic translations toured England in summer 2018 and were translated into new poetry in English and other languages in a series of workshops. A selection of these retranslations is included in Home on the Move. This multilingual anthology of poetry and translation was produced as part of the touring project ‘Talking Transformations: Home on the Move’. Features TS Eliot Prize shortlisted poet Deryn Rees-Jones. -- Publisher: Parthian Books
This important, inventive collection takes as its object the transformative play of translation itself. Translation is shown here as an inherently poetic practice, in that it reveals the fundamental instability, beauty, and complexity at the heart of language. Inviting us to look at the world through the ‘half-open’ window of poetry in translation, the collection shows how our ideas of ‘home’ are similarly mutable and unstable, flitting constantly between the known and the unknown, ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’. A love letter to Europe and celebration of free movement and multiplicity in the face of recursive ethno-nationalism, the book shows how European cultures, and their many languages, are inextricably implicated in one another, in an ever-changing dance of meaning and difference. The book is the culmination of a pan-European project, ‘Talking Transformations: Home on the Move’. Begun in 2017, this initiative set out, as the editors explain in their informative introduction, ‘to explore what “home” means to us at a time when notions of “home” in Europe are becomingly more fluid, changed and challenged by unprecedented migration’. Two poets, Deryn Rees Jones and Polish poet Rafał Gawin, were commissioned to each write on the subject, and their poems (respectively, ‘HOME’ and ‘DOM. KONSTRUKCJA W PROCESIE SĄDOWYM’, or ‘HOME. STRUCTURE ON TRIAL’, in Anna Błasiak’s translation) were then taken on two journeys around Europe, following major migration routes in and out of the UK. In each country, the poem was translated into a different language, and each ‘new’ text is included in this multi-lingual volume. Translation emerges here as a creative, attentive mode of reading, while the transmedia element of the project (it includes a mixed-media artwork by Elise Aru, and seven artists’ video ‘translations’ of the poems) invites reflection on how new technology and virtuality can further extend our understanding of translation’s sensory nature. The translations included make us aware of the materiality of language and memory – their sounds, structures and rhythms – as well as their many-layered quality. Rees Jones’s poem takes the pulse of the elusive feelings summoned by ‘HOME’. Sensed in ‘abandoned rooms / that somehow have forgotten us’, home is a resonance, an echo in an empty space. ‘[S]hrugged’ on like the snail ‘shell’s light spiral’, it is also something casual, a question mark, its language trail ‘glistening’ like a ‘bridal train’. The sense of call and response is taken up in the translations, as meaning slips imperceptibly, like the snail, from text to text. Gawin’s poem presents ‘home’ as a mash-up of private lyricism (‘a syncopating / rhythm against the wall’), state surveillance and capitalist technology; above all, it is excess and artful mess, an ‘occupational accident, a beautiful disaster’. Domingo Martínez Rosario’s video translation, At Home, uses the image of the abandoned house to emphasise the home as detritus, as what is left after loss; like many of the video translations, its submerged images also have troubling echoes with the Europe of desperate, seaborne refugees. The compassion and cleverness of this book lies in its capacity to present translation, not as an idealised lingua franca, but as a site of difficulties, gaps and awkwardness, as well as beauty. Translation is shown to put language ‘on trial’, pulling the house apart and inviting you to see it in new ways; by the end (beginning?) of the poems’ circular journeys, you realise that ‘[t]o know the world in another language / is to never know the world the same.’ -- Siriol McAvoy @ www.gwales.com