Far Within Us – A Translation Game in Art and Poetry

Workshop led by Ricarda Vidal (Translation Games) in collaboration with Pavle Ninkovic

Translation Games is a research and exhibitions project into the wonderful world of translation within fine arts and literature. For this workshop, Translation Games has teamed up with Pavle Ninkovic who runs the interactive Serbo-Croatian Poetry Translation website.

The workshop will begin with a short presentation of Translation Games and its outputs, i.e. translations from flash fiction to film, from film to ceramics or choreography, from concrete poetry to scent etc.

We will discuss the fine line between translation, interpretation and response. What does translation mean within different contexts and how can we define language beyond the linguistic realm?

For the remainder of the workshop we will challenge you to translate a visual translation of a poem back into words. The original poem was written in Serbian and has been translated by artist Danka Dimitrijevic into the more international language of images.

No foreign languages are needed to participate in this workshop, but you’ll have to enjoy the creative, imaginative and playful use of language – be it linguistic or artistic.

Workshop Leaders: Ricarda Vidal & Pavle Ninkovic

Contributing Artist: Danka Dimitrijevic

Danka Dimitrijevic was born in Kraljevo, Serbia on December 21st, 1979. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 2002 and in 2005 she received her Post Graduate’s Degree, taking painting as a major subject. She completed her PhD at the same University in 2011. She is a member of ULUS (Association of Serbian Artists) since 2004 and a member of a group of artists named “Kg of green”. She was awarded a “Perspective XXIX” prize by Yugoslav Art Gallery in Belgrade. Danka has exhibited her works independently and together with other artists, both at home and abroad. She lives and works in Belgrade. www.dankadimitrijevic.com

Pavle Ninkovic runs the Serbo-Croatian Poetry Translation initiative.

This is a collaborative online translation effort to make poetry in Serbo-Croatian more accessible to a wider audience. Pavle is motivated by the wealth of culture embedded in these works and by the power of translation to bridge the linguistic, cultural, geographic and temporal distances to reveal a common human denominator in that diversity. Pavle is interested in exploring the experience of poetry as an oral tradition and the effects of its transmission on the work itself. More.

Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, translator and curator. She teaches in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.

Her current academic and curatorial research focuses on Translation Games, a research and exhibition project around the theme of translation in literature and the fine arts. Together with the artist Sam Treadaway she also runs the bookwork project Revolve:R, an artistic exploration of visual communication in collaboration with 24 international artists.

She is the author of Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang, 2013) and has co-edited two books, The Power of Death (Berghahn, 2014) and Alternative Worlds (Peter Lang, 2015).

Further information: www.ricardavidal.com Twitter: @Ricarda_V_

For more information on Translation Games please visit:
www.translationgames.net

For more information on Serbo-Croation Poetry Translation please visit https://sites.google.com/site/projectgoethe/

Main Image: courtesy of Ricarda Vidal