Translation is one way that cultures, languages, ideas formed through those languages, historical and social specificities are able to cross borders. This impact of the foreign others is often stopped at the Canadian border because translations of foreign works are hardly encouraged or supported. In an attempt to make such borders, as well as the borders of my English, more porous, my current work-in-progress Limbinal imports translations of Paul Celan’s early Romanian poems, then transgresses the bounds of these translations to compose new poems, shape new limbs out of their movements.
Introduction
Published online March 12, 2014
Poet, translator and editor Oana Avasilichioaei’s books include We, Beasts (2012, winner of the QWF’s A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry), feria: a poempark (2008) and a poetical translational collaboration with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra (2009). She has translated poetry from the Romanian of Nichita Stănescu (Occupational Sickness, 2006), the Quebecois French of Louise Cotnoir (The Islands, 2011), and most recently a novel by Daniel Canty (Wigrum, 2013).
