Straight quotes, square brackets: Page-based poetics inflected with the syntax and grammar of code languages

Abstract

This article traces the translation of texts between cultural and linguistic contexts, between academic and public-facing audiences, between print, digital, and performed forms. It is primarily concerned with questions of punctuation arising from the translation of poetic texts from digital into print contexts, with a particular attention to brackets and quotation marks. Building on a series of talks, its current iteration as an online publication this article continues an on-going exploration of the movement of language across, beyond, and through in-between spaces. The idea of “between” is considered here as a third time/space/state, a texture, an event, a palpable unfolding fraught with cacophony, liminality, atemporality and asynchronous exchanges. In keeping with its transient subject, this article alternates between lyrical and analytical modes.