Spring Writes Literary Festival

Reading: Polychromatic Voices: Translation in Performance

“Polychromatic Voices: Translation in Performance” is the prologue to the multilingual theatre of the same title which will open at Binghamton University in Fall 2024. The source text/show script is Yangzhou Bian’s poem cycle “Yorick”, composed as a response to the presentation of blackness and whiteness in the arts. The source text co-exists in English and Mandarin. The 15 translations of the 14 chapters in Sinhalese, Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian, Malayalam, Spanish, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Italian, French, Greek, Russian, Ganian, and Ancient Chinese embody an alternative proposal to the overemphasis on race and racial identity through the journey with Yorick, the beloved skull from Shakespearean classics, and the Raven, the abused token and slighted reminder of biases. The author of the poem cycle and some of the presenters will be sharing the project, process, selected chapters from the original, and their translations. We hope to bring the audience a glimpse of the various cultures through art and conversation. With Yangzhou (Yao) Bian, Batool Alghamdim, Jionghao Liu, Sula Mahagam and Abdul Razak Mohammed.

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