POETRY IN TRANSLATIONS

 

From 2009 - (ongoing)

 

 

 

 

Work format: Sentence, Translation and re-translations

  

 

Introduction:

 

“Poetry in Translations” a series of Poetry, is made from re-translations by multiple languages.  

 

If you look at the old Buddhist Scriptures in Japan, they are often translated from Chinese, which has been translated from Sanskrit. Therefore a Japanese version of such scriptures is somewhat different from the originals due to re-translations.

Also, the Christian holy bible in Japan is re-translated and has some discrepancies from the original.

 Some claim that such discrepancies contributed the birth of Japanese versions of the preexisting religions. Those re-translated versions were their official documents.

 

In this series of poetry, the first line will be translated into another language, and then retranslated again and again with machine translations. This action will be done until it creates a different meaning; like we travel to “other” places in order to make a different sense of the meaning of our life.　In this artwork, translations imply journeys and this artwork tries to capture “poetry-ness” arising within processes of translation themselves.