Guessing from Textones. Distributed Translation as Exemplified by Sea and Spar Between (2010) by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort

Abstract

This article discusses the challenges of translating poetry generators in multi-authorial, creative collaborations and within the context of understanding text as a process. Stephanie Strickland’s and Nick Montfort’s Sea and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might be considered an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one-syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic, kennings have different morphological, lexical, and grammatical arrangements, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the JavaScript code, instructions that accompany the JavaScript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, needed to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forced us to modify the code. In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to JavaScript), which combines them in almost countless ways. Such a collision of cultures, languages, and tools becomes amplified when transposed into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and ourselves, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.