click: relative fluency zine

Description:

“This is an interactive zine: you can use the free space! 

You’ll find questions about language use, ownership, being a ‘native’ speaker, and having a ‘mother tongue.’ Concepts that, in evoking bloodlines and nationalities, make those of us who have complex answers or feel uneasy with such terms (in our gut or politically), slightly shrink.

You’ll find Deleuze & Guattari and Louisa Yousfi on reappropriating colonial or majority languages.

It’s impossible not to think with Palestinians right now, so you’ll find three poems on Arabic, in this language. You’ll finally find a poem I attempted to translate from Greek, on exile and translatability.”

I made this zine for the exhibition Born Translated – Reading comparatively which accompanied the PhD masterclass How will we read in the future? Comparative literature and translation studies in the 21^st century, on 21-23 March 2024 at Ghent University. The call for works asked us to engage with the idea of reading comparatively and/or the concept of being born translated “i.e. works for which translation is a condition of production and no longer an afterthought,” inspired by the two guests: Emer O’Sullivan (Leuphana University) and Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers University) respectively. I chose the latter, the theme regarding multilingualism being prevalent in my research, borrowing a chapter title from Walkowitz’s book Born Translated (chapter 4: This is not your language. Relative fluency) and exploring personal questions open to readers-writers (as seen in the first picture), theoretical writing, and poems, with this in mind. The curators picked out lines from a poem in the zine to be used for a bridge translation open to anyone visiting the exhibition, a sample of which you can find in the second picture.