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So we are here with Máighréad Medbh who is participating in the ISLA Festival here at the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin.
Welcome. Thanks. Great to have you here.
First of all, I just want to ask,
do you have any
Spanish language connections that kind of drew you into the Festival?
No, I believe it was Jean-Philippe Imbert who recommended me
because I suppose it's a performance thing.
I'm not sure, really.
But
I don´t have Spanish connections except that I've been involved
in translating a couple of poems,
of Galician poems.
But apart from that, none. Wonderful.
Earlier in the session that you were involved in which was the
"Crossing Frontiers. Session on poetry and suitcase".
You were making the case for poetry being
experimental
and not boring. Could you tell us a bit about
how you
try
to make your poetry experimental, make it something that people are excited to read?
I know you do performance poetry as well.
Yes.
Well, I started off
by publishing a collection.
But my poetic philosophy from the beginning
was to write poems that mirrored the sense, in other words, that
formally
represented the experience.
That's the oldest rule in the book, I suppose.
I suppose most contemporary poets don't do it.
So
I decided that twenty years ago
and I haven't found a better rule.
And I need to know where I'm going, I need to have a plan with whatever I write. Sometimes I write in prose as well.
I need some sort of philosophy
or plan, a core
notion and that's always been my core notion.
I've been interested in drama. I've done acting and training
in voice and movement.
So I suppose I did that because I was interested in
being other people, being other personalities.
So my poetry
predictably
follows the same sort of impulse and I like to explore different personalities and
different feelings.
And it seems the thing to do for me.
To try and mirror that in the form and then when I present the poem.
I try and reflect the experience in how I'm presenting it so I want to live
the experience again.
It's a physical thing
and
I suppose I'm very interested in new theories
of the embodied mind.
The old Cartesian theory is fast fading now.
But it's been said for hundreds of years that there's a separation between the mind and the body.
I've never felt that separation and now I'm being vindicated by theories that agree with
me.
Neuroscientific, philosophical and linguistic theories
that are propounding this notion of
the mind and the body all being one, we can't really separate one from the other.
We have some embedded metaphors that
produce themselves without our even thinking about them.
That's really where
I am at with the poetry
and why I'm doing it. And it's becoming deeper
because of this new research, because of these new ideas.
I now feel
it's a philosophy.
So it's the poetry that encompasses the whole self, it's
not separate.
There's no separation between the mind and body. No, because actually
meaning
and sound have always been intertwined for me.
And I also felt guilty about that
because
I found it hard to listen to somebody if their voice is
creating
certain reactions and responses in the body.
And I've always felt that I was a bit of
whatever... churlish over that.
Because people always were: Wasn't that wonderful what he said? I didn´t hear a word of it
because
his voice.
I couldn´t listen to his voice.
Not as much the content but the presentation is what bothers.
Yes, for me in a sense, it is. I will pour over text if I don't like the style.
For me, it all seems to be the one, the style
and the thinking,
It's all very intertwined.
You were saying earlier that you've done some translations. Are there certain things that you find
or express
better in a different language than English?
Well I've just worked with Galician
and actually the last couple of translations were
in... This particular writer writes in both Galician and Spanish.
When I approached the text, the Galician text first I went:
Oh, my good grief!
How am I going to represent these sounds, these vowels and these S's in English
because
the broadness of it
and even the look of the words on the page, I knew the equivalent words in English
and
if I took the instant equivalent word in English I'd be...
It felt that I would be applying
steel to
velvet.
I'm gonna have to work with this.
So I did talk to somebody from Galicia,
who read the poems for me, taught me something of how she was feeling and I could see
the effect the words were having in her body.
For example there was one word: "inmenso". So, for me if I say "inmense", I go "inmense".
As if what.
She said "inmenso" and I could see red tinged
with
dark blue and black.
And she took it right down into her stomach.
Oh, that's different, it's "inmenso".
She's containing it.
I would say certainly.
I'm not sure because I don't know the Spanish language well enough but in Irish
there are certain words
that I...
There are certain expressions in Irish
that I cannot translate into English without constantly coming up in my mind - N`fheadar
is one of them.
N´fheadar
I mean it just sounds excellent.
And there are other words that just come to mind in Irish and
there is no equivalent.
And I suppose that's because
the form of thinking
and the language is connected.
So cultural experience, national experience...
We are pretty much the same, human beings all over. But certain experiences I suppose
have been expressed in certain words that therefore we don't translate.
Yes, definitely. So the body obviously encompasses this whole cultural experience as well
and your language is going to reflect that.
So you are saying if you are coming from a different culture, a different language they may not have
that same
intrinsic connection to certain words.
I would say so, that's why translation must be very difficult but I love translating.
And I did find it a difficult but a fantastic experience because I love the empathizing.
And it's really for
the other writer you are doing it.
And
for the sharing.
By proxy in a sense.
Although when you are sharing somebody's work, contributing into somebody's work
and the way
you enter into something that is extraordinarily intimate.
So without meeting the body,
you are entering into a sort of empathic relationship with somebody. And that's really quite a privilege.
It's really great.
And it must be treated very carefully, I'm sure.
Yes, you have to be careful. So when I was doing I was constantly referring back
to the editor
who would then
perhaps talk to the poet.
But as well as that with the translation it's interesting because you
do feel,
I do feel that
if I´m approaching, if I'm going to do a version of a text
I have to have enough freedom
to reproduce it
in my own culture terms and in my own personal perceptive tems as well.
It's automatically expected
a certain translation from their knowledge of English
and
they are not always right to do that.
Because, I mean, it's a relationship.
So you bring along your cultural experiencies. And my personal experiencies. And my own hopes for the text.
There is a response. It's a call and response.
It seems very collaborative. Like you might think the translation as a
kind of a one-sided
experience but it sounds very collaborative from what you are saying.
Well, there are whole different ways
of approaching it.
But I'd certainly like to reproduce
as far as possible the intent of the author.
So with those first poems I did.
I took a lot of care to try and reproduce the sounds.
So I would have changed the phraseology.
I would have maybe said things that the original author
didn't exactly said in order to
give that taste of the poem.
It's like imitating
a fruit. You want to produce
another fruit
that is so similar that somebody would say: "oh, they are on
the same family".
Trying to turn the lines
but also trying to reproduce just the taste as well.
That's great.
Can you tell us more about the reading that you have tomorrow?
Are you going to be doing performance poetry? Well, I'm going to be reciting, yes.
Can you tell us a bit about the piece? Haven't you picked the piece yet?
Yes, several pieces and the pieces I chose I chose them because of the topic we were discussing today
about change
and transitional travel,
basically from country to city.
But having listened to everything today I may change...There's one poem I feel like reading.
So I might be dropping a few poems.
And doing this one instead, It's one called "Inis"
and it's about home, sense of home
and language.
The world Inis in Irish means "island"
and also
it's the verb to tell.
It's kind of interesting that the noun island is the verb to tell.
So it's about the language. Wonderful. Thank you very much
for being here with us today and we look foward to you reading tomorrow. Thank you.