THE SOUND A POEM MAKES
With poet and translator Keith Payne
Wednesday, October 8, at 1 PM
The Bridge Room (1001), James Hardiman Research Building
Is there, as Jane Hirshfield posits, ‘a sacred contract between the original articulation of sound and its embedded emotion’? And if so, then where is that contract signed? What vehicle is used to deliver it? And can be it translated?
Going beyond prosody and onto to what David Crystal termed Phonaesthesia —the pleasing sounds of words— we will investigate the communicative possibilities of the sound a word makes, the sound a line makes and thus the sound the poem makes. We will consider how worthwhile a pursuit this approach is to literary translation, and whether in fact we can even translate the sound the poem makes.
No previous translation experience is necessary, and this event is open to all students and faculty.
Keith Payne is the author of eleven collections of poetry in translation and original poetry, most recently Savage Acres(Dedalus Press, 2025) and Building the Boat (Badly Made Books, 2023), which was featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay. Whales and Whales, from the Galician of Luisa Castro, was published by Skein Press in April 2024. He curates the Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill Poetry Exchange Ireland/Galicia in association with Literature Ireland, Poetry Ireland and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig and has edited over a dozen titles of poetry in translation. He has led translation workshops in Oxford; The Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation; The British Centre for Literary Translation and The Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s Belfast among others venues.
Translation Café is a monthly event run by the Emily Anderson Centre for Translation Research and Practice. Colleagues interested in leading future Translation Café events are invited to contact Ira at Irina.ruppo@universityofgalway.ie