On Caroline Bergvall and Visual Poetry
Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation I just discovered a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading “Via”, a poem composed entirely of English translations of the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
It might sound like a thin idea, but it’s mesmerising to listen to. What’s more, even if you know that translation is a complex process that makes meanings rather than just safely transporting them from one language to another, the repetition and the variations together really bring it home in a way that just reading the words doesn’t. So her reading is a beautiful piece musically, but it does something intellectually, too, that’s hard to precisely put a finger on.
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