4 Reasons to Attend The Animated Reader’s Launch at McNally Jackson Tonight

McNally Jackson is hosting the launch of The Animated Reader tonight, and you should come out.

Contributors Mónica de la Torre, Cory Tamler, Wayne Koestenbaum and Yan Jun will be reading, and Brian Droitcour, who edited this ambitious collection, will be moderating.

At first glance, The Animated Reader calls to mind Marina Tsvetaeyva’s famous “All poetry is translation” statement. It features “poets who translate, poets who flout the conventions of translation [and] poets whose work poses challenges to translation that their translators cannily resolve,” while also exploring the possibility of “poetic experience in everyday language” with interspersed fragments lifted from social media.

I didn’t know the work of all of the poets on this evening’s roster, but was taken by their writings and translations that appear in The Animated Reader, the poetry companion to Surround Audience, this year’s New Museum’s Triennial. I’m attending tonight to grab a copy of the book and to see these stars in action.

A taste of their contributions to the collection:

1. Mónica de la Torre

Mónica de la Torre presents an eight-page piece called “Like in Valencia,” whose point of departure is her poem “Equivalencias,” written in Spanish. Over the course of the next seven pages, each an individual stand-alone poem, she uses several procedures to translate and retranslate the text into English, at one point dictating the Spanish text to English-speaking Siri and transcribing the phrases she generates. A sort of #actual game of telephone, if you will:

Y si cinco veces te preguntas/ qué hago aquí, quema tu cama/ déjala arder y vete. (“Equivalencias”)

And if five times you ask yourself,/ What am I doing here? set your bed on fire,/ let it burn, and leave. (“Conversions”)

And if you ask five times/ What am I doing here, burning your bed,/ let it burn and go. (“Equivalences”)

Five times, or the fifth time, is the same./ I call your name, and… I don’t hear you./ I’m sensing that the person whom the pome is addressed to/ is as distracted as I am right now./ Someone isn’t listening to something. (“The Poem Is Titled Equivalencies”)

5 times and if you wonder/ why I’m here/ burning gel/ drum great/ song and old age. (“Equivalence”)

5 of us/ resist questions/ and another will fuck chuck. (“Llamaradas Are Blow Jobs”)

Y Si cinch vexes etc. pregnant/ Queen aqua queer too came/ Female ardor y veteran. (“Equivalence Equivalency (SMS autocorrect)”)

What are you doing burning through layers/ ask five times/ and eagerly. Then flee./ Just go. Zeros and ones./ Here. (“Numbers As Qualifiers”)

2. Cory Tamler

Cory Tamler’s contribution to The Animated Reader are her translations of Stefanie Sargnagel’s German feed entries. The posts vary in length and presumably borrow from Sargnagel's Facebook and Twitter. They range from pithy self-declarations to lamentations of capitalism and "not-love":

She’s got me in the palm of her hand, totally, I belong to her, one of these days against my will I’m going to go down on her, no question. An apron of fat shows through her pants, covering her vagina. I know that under there it’s very, very sweaty and tastes salty like the sea.

3. Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum presents a short piece where he addresses and retranslates the early 20th century avant-garde French artist, Max Jacob:

I remember my baby chamber because, Max, why shouldn’t I celebrate its smelly walls and unconscionable drapes?

4. Yan Jun

Chinese writer and musician Yan Jun’s piece in The Animated Reader is translated by Ao Wang and Eleanor Goodman. My favorite parts of his “Charter Sonnet”:

I demand an increase in birth control, the encouragement of same-sex marriage, and the imposition of fines on heterosexual marriage;

I demand a ban on mahjong and KTV, the detainment of those who walk their dogs at 5 a.m., and the holding of regular poetry readings in police stations;

I demand that you and I be together, never to be separated

See you tonight, I can’t wait!