Sirens Are My Best Chimera
Mónica de la Torre and Eleni Sikelianos with Janice Lowe
Poets and translators Eleni Sikelianos and Mónica de la Torre will perform and discuss recent work reflecting on chimeras, translation, and song, with interventions by composer-poet Janice Lowe.
If sirens carry the head of a woman and the body of a bird, what being is the voice? Sirens are just one species in the genus of (sometimes monstrous) human-animal hybrids, and chimerism is not only the stuff of myth. Marmosets are natural chimeras, and human chimeras sometimes carry the cellular ghosts of a lost or living twin.
Animating their performance are questions such as: How does chimerism extend our thinking about language technologies and translation beyond the “carrying across” of meaning implied by the term? What bodies of words are hidden when we move from language to language? If a poem is “a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense” (Valéry), and if the body carries more animals than we think, what kind of creatures do the voicings of poems produce?
This event is organized in the framework of SIREN (some poetics), a group exhibition and a poetics devoted to technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and language. The title of this event is drawn from something the poet Phoebe Giannisi said to one of the performers,
Prior registration is recommended.