Duplex

by Jericho Brown, Mayra Rodriguez Castro (Contributor), Alix Eynaudi (Contributor)

With translations by Kirill Mededev, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri, Fernanda Brenner, Monika Szewczyk, Alix Eynaudi, Iman Issa, Natasha Ginwala. Jericho Brown's Duplex in translation is the second book in a new series co-produced by Fivehundred Places and V–A–C Press, Moscow, and is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem. Jericho Brown is the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer prize in poetry. He has emerged in the past decade as one of the significant voices in American poetry. A great interview with Jericho can be found here Duplex is both a poem and a form. The repetition of the second line of each stanza as the first line of the next, makes questions,to question, breaths to breathing and light to light. I asked several artists, who I imagined could relate/ meditate/ absorb some of Duplex. Denise Ferreire da Silva & Valentine Desederi read the poems Tarot. Christodoulos Panayiotou translated Duplex to the Greek-Cypriot dialect in Greeklish, the use of the latin alphabet. Alix Eynaudi's translation is a movement exercise, and Natasha Ginwala chose an image from the Mugal period. Meanwhile translations to Portugese, Polish, Spanish and Arabic hold surprise and witness to the folding and unfolding of this poem. Translations are greedy (the need for more) they are a sort of re-mix, a dance, they are true and untrue. The artist's voice has potential for the sort of recklessness of imagination that I am looking for now.

Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown teaches at the University of San Diego where he is the Director of the Cropper Center for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and several other journals and anthologies. PLEASE, his first book, won the 2009 American Book Award.