On Radio Ambulante, Urayoán Noel and Daniel Alarcón Summon the Spirit of Cesar Vallejo

On Public Radio International's Radio Ambulante, award-winning novelist and host, Daniel Alarcón, speaks with Puerto Rican poet and performer Urayoán Noel who is at work translating the poems of Cesar Vallejo ("a poet of the popular tongue") with voice recognition software in order to find additional (contemporary) meanings to Vallejo's already complex poetry. From Radio Ambulante:

[...] Urayoan Noel knows how to have fun with language and poetry. For one of his latest experiments, Noel took Cesar Vallejo, an iconic and widely recognized Peruvian poet, and put him through a digital translation process. He read poems from Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce into a voice-recognition program and wrote down the English translations that the software came up with. The result is an unintelligible English-language version of Vallejo’s already complex poems.

Here’s an example, with the original in Spanish followed by the English translation according to Noel’s voice-recognition program:

Era era.

Gallos cancionan escarbando en vano.

Boca del claro día que conjuga.

era era era era.

Data Data

Dido scans the owner is co-bundle in buying

oh and I will be ethical to

a data in data and data

So what did Noel learn about Vallejo after putting him through this digital translation process? In this episode Noel talks to host Daniel Alarcón about this and other experiments in poetry and translation.

Listen in to Radio Ambulante to hear "the stories of Latin America," hosted by Daniel Alarcón, at Public Radio International.