Outransmesse

The outransmesse is a pluripolyheteroretrotranslation. Or for those not specialized in Outranspo terminology: it is a series of translations beginning with an initial phrase suggested by Lily Robert-Foley, “on/off”, that was then translated in a chain back and forth across several languages, by several translators. These translators include Santiago Artozqui, Jonathan Baillehache, Camille Bloomfield, Chris Clarke, Irène Gayraud, Delphine Presles and Lily Robert-Foley. The arrangement of the final voices was composed by Lily Robert-Foley, much aided in the mixing process by Santiago Artozqui. 

Messe is a French word for Catholic Mass. The “mess(e)” form, developed in 2013 by Lily Robert-Foley and Heta Rundgren, is thus a bilingual play on the religious ceremony and the disorder connoted in the English word “mess”. It is a choral poem comprised of melodic and rhythmic looping linguistic syntagms layered one on top of each other to make a Conference of the Birds, growing in cacophony and confusion as it evolves.

Lily Robert-Foley

Lily Robert-Foley is Maîtresse de Conférences at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, specializing in translation. She is currently self-translating her doctoral dissertation on the Third Texte, a creative reading device for deforming the space between translations. She is the author of m, a book of poetry-critique-collage (Corrupt Press, 2013), graphemachine, a chapbook of visual poetry (Xerolage, 2013), Jiji, a book of prose poems and conceptual writing (forthcoming Omnia Vanitas Press) and Money, Math and Measure (forthcoming, Essay Press chapbook series). She is currently writer in residence at the Gula Summer Institute in Maine where she is working on the figural alliances between translation and digestion, with a particular focus on lobster. 

Santiago Artozqui

Santiago Artozqui writes short stories, essays, poetry, and translates from Spanish and English into French. Former literary critic in La Quinzaine littéraire, he now writes in En attendant Nadeau, a web literary review. He teaches creative writing at the university Paris 7 Diderot, and is president of ATLAS, an organization for the promotion of literary translation. He’s also old and not funny, too bad for him.

Jonathan Baillehache

Jonathan Baillehache teaches French (electronic) literature, video games and translation studies at the University of Georgia, in Athens (home of R.E.M. and Bobby Prince). He, too, is a Tiphainito (a former doctoral student of Tiphaine Samoyault). He defended his dissertation on the translation of Russian “zaum” poetry in 2012. He translates occasionally from French to English, from Russian to French and English, and from English to French, but his hobbyhorse is to think about translation in the framework of philosophy and digital humanities.

Camille Bloomfield

Camille Bloomfield tries to do as many things as one possibly can, such as translating poetry (from Italian: Patrizia Valduga, Mariangela Gualtieri, & from English: Lily Robert-Foley, Yuyutsu Sharma, H. D. Thoreau); writing interface poems on Instagram & making short video-poems on Youtube; teaching literature and communication at Université Paris 13 & University of Geneva; conducting research on Oulipo, manifestoes, digitized heritage, and platforms for collaborative translation. On her free time, she makes lists, plays music and co-founds groups like Outranspo.

Chris Clarke

Chris Clarke was raised in Western Canada, and currently lives in Princeton, NJ.  His translations include work by Raymond Queneau (New Directions), Patrick Modiano (NYRB Classics), and Pierre Mac Orlan (Wakefield Press, forthcoming), among others. His recent Outranspo-related projects include organizing a many-handed translation of an excerpt from Queneau’s “Les Fleurs Bleues” that passes from Italo Calvino’s Italian translation through those of 37 other translators via 6 languages, as well as a collaborative translation of a simultaneous 5-act play by Olivier Salon & Jacques Jouet (w/Emma Ramadan). He was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2016 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives” (forthcoming, Wakefield Press).

Irène Gayraud

Irène Gayraud writes poetry, poetical-extremely-short-fictions, and currently a novel. She has published two books : à distance de souffle, l’air (Éditions du Petit Pois, 2014), and Voltes (Al Manar, 2016).  She translates from Italian, Spanish and German into French : she collaborated with Christophe Mileschi to translate the Dino Campana’s poetical work (Dino Campana, Chants Orphiques et autres poèmes, Paris, Points, coll. “Poésie”, 2016). In addition, she holds a doctorate from Paris IV-Sorbonne. 

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