August in translation

“August in Translation” investigates the ethics of engagement with poetry written after mass social trauma (Witness Poetry), and the possible ways of imagining a creative methodology for compassionate relationship through translation and response poetry. As a first step in compassionate engagement, I use translation of the Witness Poem; both an act of “love” and a “risk, a transgression”. I then write response poetry, after translation, opening further reflection and creative exploration, illuminating the anxieties, ambiguities and “transgressions” within the position of witness to Witness. Compassion, as a framework for ethical engagement, relies on an acknowledgement of distance, of being on the fringes of another’s trauma, and endlessly reaching toward an unreachable other. These poems are a case-study of this methodology, a tool for opening the response to the original Witness Poem, coming to terms with the risk of translation and feeling through my own position of being-on-the-fringe to another’s poetic testimony. This project focuses on the reading, translation and response to “August” by Sarah Kirsch. My translation is not meant to offer a final version of this German Witness Poem, rather I intend to offer an opening towards the original poem, as the impossibility of translation resists closure and maintains ongoing relationship. The “response poems” are a working-through of positionality relating to poetic testimony to trauma, acting as artefacts mapping my personal response and methodological troubles/thinking/questioning of engagement, opened by the initial, unfinishable act of translation.