Today’s guerrilla reader is Jen Hofer, poet, translator, urban cyclist and more. Here she reads several poems from her translation of Myriam Moscona‘s Negro marfil (Ivory Black), from indie publisher Les Figues Press. As she tells us in the video, this book itself is a visual object to accompany the poetry on the page.
In her essay, Suspension of Belief: Thoughts on Translation as Subversive Speech, Hofer says this:
How can we become aware of what there is to see in what we do not see? We become entrenched; we need instigations, provocations, to be pried out of wherever it is we land most comfortably. Translation functions to change the pitch or tone at which we live: the white noise of “the normal” becomes audible in the new scale a foreign body traces. Translation reminds us that context is everything — as is content, as is form.
Read Hofer’s bio, or check out her website-in-waiting.
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