{"id":362,"date":"2017-05-02T04:35:42","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T04:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/?p=362"},"modified":"2017-05-11T15:44:55","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T15:44:55","slug":"password-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/2017\/05\/02\/password-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Home&#8221; by Warsan Shire"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>Translation by Liljuan Gonzalez:<\/h1>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/215609905\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>(password: dance)<\/p>\n<pre><strong>Original Text:<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>\"Home\" by Warsan Shire<\/strong>\r\n\r\nno one leaves home unless \r\nhome is the mouth of a shark \r\nyou only run for the border \r\nwhen you see the whole city running as well \r\n\r\nyour neighbors running faster than you \r\nbreath bloody in their throats \r\nthe boy you went to school with \r\nwho kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory \r\nis holding a gun bigger than his body\r\n you only leave home\r\n when home won\u2019t let you stay. \r\n\r\nno one leaves home unless home chases you\r\nfire under feet\r\nhot blood in your belly\r\nit\u2019s not something you ever thought of doing \r\nuntil the blade burnt threats into \r\nyour neck \r\nand even then you carried the anthem under \r\nyour breath \r\nonly tearing up your passport in an airport toilets\r\nsobbing as each mouthful of paper \r\nmade it clear that you wouldn\u2019t be going back. \r\n\r\nyou have to understand, \r\nthat no one puts their children in a boat \r\nunless the water is safer than the land \r\nno one burns their palms \r\nunder trains \r\nbeneath carriages \r\nno one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck\r\nfeeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled\r\nmeans something more than journey. \r\nno one crawls under fences \r\nno one wants to be beaten \r\npitied \r\n\r\nno one chooses refugee camps \r\nor strip searches where your \r\nbody is left aching \r\nor prison, \r\nbecause prison is safer\r\nthan a city of fire \r\nand one prison guard \r\nin the night \r\nis better than a truckload \r\nof men who look like your father \r\nno one could take it \r\nno one could stomach it \r\nno one skin would be tough enough \r\n\r\nthe \r\ngo home blacks \r\nrefugees \r\ndirty immigrants \r\nasylum seekers \r\nsucking our country dry\r\nniggers with their hands out \r\nthey smell strange \r\nsavage messed up their country and now they want \r\nto mess ours up \r\nhow do the words \r\nthe dirty looks \r\nroll off your backs \r\nmaybe because the blow is softer \r\nthan a limb torn off \r\n\r\nor the words are more tender \r\nthan fourteen men between \r\nyour legs \r\nor the insults are easier \r\nto swallow \r\nthan rubble \r\nthan bone \r\nthan your child's body in pieces. \r\ni want to go home, \r\nbut home is the mouth of a shark \r\nhome is the barrel of the gun \r\nand no one would leave home \r\nunless home chased you to the shore \r\nunless home told you \r\nto quicken your legs \r\nleave your clothes behind \r\ncrawl through the desert \r\nwade through the oceans \r\ndrown \r\nsave \r\nbe hungery \r\nbeg \r\nforget pride \r\nyour survival is more important \r\n\r\nno one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear \r\nsaying\r\nleave, \r\nrun away from me now \r\ni don't know what i\u2019ve become \r\nbut i know that anywhere \r\nis safer than here \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n<div class=\"entry-content clearfix\">\n<h2>Translation Rationale:<\/h2>\n<p>Throughout the semester, we have worked on various forms of translation and analyzed how that form emulates and\/or deviate from the original works. With that in mind, I decided for my final project to translate <em>Home<\/em> into a motif-improvisational dance piece. The aim for this translation was to reveal how translation does not have to be solely bound to literary modes; the modalities of translation are infinite and allowing dance to become one of the modes for translation to occur show the bountiful capacity of movement and translation. It is with that in mind, and the ephemeral nature of both processes, that I established a need to execute a movement project that completes my final translation of <em>Home<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><em>Home<\/em>, by Warsan Shire, depicts the visceral ruminations and response of an immigrant when encountering the fac. The poem allows us to gaze upon the terror that immigrants face while escaping the dangers of their home. The poet structured the poem using enjambment throughout the piece, constructing a narrative for the piece. That was one of the prominent features that stood out besides the diction and syntax used for the poem\u2019s imagery. Besides the dance translation I just completed, I also completed an inter-lingual and vowel removal translation. For both translations, I attempted to maximize the theme (immigration) throughout the reproduced work. However, it was difficult to reconstruct the poem after removing several vowels. The latter resulted in incomprehensible words which made it difficult to read the new poem afterwards. On the other hand, I believe the inter-lingual translation was one of the powerful translation due to my decision to convert the poem into Arabic\u2014 one of the native language of Shire\u2019s Somalian ancestry. Even while translating the poem into Arabic I could maintain the prominent theme I was aiming for, but I was also able to connect it to Shire\u2019s identity. Analyzing this poem from an outsider perspective reduces my capacity to fully engage with the nuanced information. It is important for me to state how Shire\u2019s experience deriving from her first-generation immigrant family, her understanding of her black womanhood, and her heritage as a Somalian is heavily interwoven in her poems, including <em>Home<\/em>. So in a lot of ways, I\u2019m interpreting and analyzing this poem from an outsider perspective, attempting to maintain the integrity of her culture and the crucial identities she possess that encapsulates the raw emotion of the narrative of so many.<\/p>\n<p>The final translation is similar to the ones mentioned above in terms of staying closely related to the overall theme of the poem. However, movement took the place of traditional literary modes of translation. As a dancer, I always believe there is power to be find in dance that is completely untapped or overlooked within scholarly inquiry. When we think about dance and the way we use it as a vehicle to share canons, emotions, political commentaries, etc., we realized that its reach is endless. Movement in general becomes another way to translate stories, while challenging the default ideology of translation being solely bound to literary devices. Using dance as my final translation modality allowed me to translate the emotional aspect of the piece that I felt was reduced or completely removed if read by an outsider (someone with a lack of proximity to the immigrant identity). Some of the advantages of this translation was performing the emotional aspect of the poem via movement and Shire\u2019s reading of the poem. Another advantage was showing the ephemeral nature of both translation and dance; the ability of both to exist within a temporary timeframe if left unarchived. I will discuss further later on in the paper.<\/p>\n<p>I want to quickly state that in my personal opinion, and from what I have gathered in class this entire semester, there is no \u201csuccessful\u201d translation. I think the moment we began to produce translated works, the \u201creproductions\u201d become new productions themselves. In other words: they become entirely new works. I created the dance translation hoping to ideally stay within the thematic parameters of the poem, but I can never say that it is a \u201csuccessful\u201d translation of the poem because there is plenty of sections, emotions and other material that I couldn\u2019t reproduce through movement. On the other hand, I transformed the literary piece into movement, producing a different visual way of seeing, feeling, hearing and experiencing <em>Home<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>This entire class has taught me how translation comes in many forms and to not bind translation to just intra-lingual modes. I believe we also learned that there are also numerous processes of translation depending on what you wish to translate and how you want to translate it. However, we failed to mention how translation occur daily and sometimes they aren\u2019t recorded through literary devices. Instead, they become ephemeral forms of communication that are constantly disappearing by the conclusion of the conversation. This reflects dance. Dance is also ephemeral in the sense that the performance of movement disappears by the conclusion of the dance piece, sometimes earlier, but this highlights how communication (dance and translation) isn\u2019t always archived for storage means. Sometimes they are stated in open space and disappear shortly after appearing. In conclusion, my final project initiates a conversation on a different mode of translation, but it also teases out the ephemeral aspect of translation itself. Perhaps, that aspect could be explored further in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Translation by Liljuan Gonzalez: (password: dance) Original Text: &#8220;Home&#8221; by Warsan Shire no one leaves home unless home is the&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4559,"featured_media":411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/files\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-11-at-11.43.55-AM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/complit203\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}