The Polyphonic Echoes of Bridge Translation in A Bird I s Not a Stone (2014)

Abstract This article explores the polyphonic echoes of “bridge translation” in A Bird I s Not a Stone (2014), a multilingual anthology of contemporary Palestinian poetry with English, Scots, Gaelic and Shetlandic translations. Bridge translation – when a “literal” translation is first produced in the target language by a translator which is then used by an author to craft a second more “literary” version – has been celebrated as a collaborative mode of co-production that can facilitate cross-cultural solidarities. However, the method has also been critiqued for preserving the “invisibility of the translator” (Venuti 2018), undervaluing their creative role and linguistic expertise through the unequal recognition of labor involved in this process. Drawing on translation theory and scholarship on postcolonial print culture, I argue that A Bird I s Not a Stone models a multilingual – and distinctly polyphonic – mode of publication which provocatively exposes, and experiments with, its own tactics of translation. I first examine how the anthology confronts, and creatively incorporates, the “untranslatability” of poetry through a polyphonic paratextual framework. I then consider the particular politics of bridge translation when bringing Palestinian and Scottish literary contexts into dialogue, illuminating unlikely affinities that emerge between these literatures through their range of linguistic registers. Finally, I trace how these polyphonic echoes reverberate across individual poems in the collection through multilingual textual arrangements, multiple translations, and intertextual references while also drawing attention to significant silences in the anthology.