Tania Favela/Will Rowe - Motion Towards No Place
Veer2 Publication 030 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-57-8] A5 size, Landscape. 28 pages. February 2023.
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Tania Favela/Will Rowe - Motion Towards No Place
'That sound is lost in the translation of poems is a thing generally said; and sense too, given their intertwining. But in William Rowe’s translations of Tania Favela there’s no loss but instead a series of sonorous-semantic operations and alterations that involve a gain in the English. In Favela’s poems a voice—embodied as arm, jaw or mouth—mingles with other voices—read, heard, thought—in a minor tone. To say minor tone is not to say weakness of speech: the whispers that run through her poems are full of vocal force, embodied in hesitations, iterations—of words, phrases and sounds—and constant detours that create a rhythm as if they were theatrical directions inside a work without narrative, without representations. What Rowe achieves in these translations is to give a sharper sonority to Favela’s poems: a distinctly dryer timbre through the play of the larger quantity of monosyllables available in English. The result is a condensed, tense movement of sound centred on the rhythm, which is where the emotion of these poems materialises. An instance, from the first poem: punza la voz como mordida de hormiga - the voice pierces like an ant-bite'
– Luis Verdejo
This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.