Empires of the Everyday. Poetry as Translation of Empire


Abstract


This article examines how poetry might act as a translator of Empire and posits that such translation is a critical component of resistance, following Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian’s (2020) framing of translator as witness-bearer. I consider ways that poetry might engage in acts of translation across a single language to reflect the historical and contemporary contexts of imperialism and colonialization, and recognize this as a political process, drawing from scholars working on translation and/or language, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2018), Luciana de Mesquita Silva and Dennys SilvaReis (2019), and Don Mee Choi (2020). This article specifically examines a collection of poetry I wrote, titled Empires of the Everyday, wherein the poems spar with an AI translator to expose the history and ongoing presence of colonialism and state violence. Through this examination, this article asks: How might a poetry versed in a Black feminist praxis render a translation of Empire possible? How might such a translation focus attention on “reflecting, intuiting, making sense of, and undoing the times we live in”, which Dionne Brand (2017b, audio recording) has suggested is the liberating work of poetry? How is such a process of translating across paradigms implicated in acts of activism as resistance?

Keywords: Empire; translation; poetry; resistance; activism

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