In our new brave world of DeepL and other types of automatic interlinguistic transfer, translation may have lost much of its thorns as well as its charms. Technology seems to have killed, for the relief of many, the age-old debates on traduttore-traditore. Yet just like the invention of photography made room for other, nonmimetic forms of painting, the rapid spread of machine translation is paradoxically bringing to the fore the possibility, if not the absolute necessity of other ways of translating, not all of them absolutely new but now all at the center of some the most extraordinary strands in contemporary writing.

These other translation strategies and practices are based on a fundamental assumption: translation is writing, that is the production of new texts, not to be confused with the sole idea of “artistic” or “original” translations, as for instance in the reinterpretation of one poet by another. In addition, many of these other translations are themselves systematic and systematically radicalized new versions of already existing unconventional forms of moving from one language to another language. The best known example here is undoubtedly that of the homophonic translation, a classic type of experimental literature transposing less the meaning than the sound of the original language (the most interesting cases do not simply focus on sound at the expense of meaning, obviously).

A member of Double change, the Parisian group fostering interaction between French and US avant-garde writing via bilingual performances and mutual translations, Vincent Broqua, professor of American literature at Paris 8 University, has coined these practices “shifty translations”, the term “shifty” also containing or connoting words such as “shift” (the idea of transfer and transportation) or “shitty” (the idea of a purportedly and willfully wrong translation). His recent work is brilliantly illustrated in two small but important publications that frustrate all generic codes or classifications. Theory and practice, quotation and analysis, fragments of anthology and inclusion of unpublished personal work, French and English, oral performance and written publication are here not simply mixed but made truly undistinguishable.

Broqua’s translations – it should be reminded represent just one aspect of his creative-scholarly work, which also includes essay on Marcel Duchamp and Josef Albers – activate four different yet inextricable linked dimensions.

The first is literature itself. Similar to Kenneth Goldmith’s defense of “uncreative writing” through the (re)construction of a “copy-paste” tradition which gives much of its force to their more contemporary equivalents and continuations, Broqua unfolds an amazing wealth of artists having explored similar “shifty” techniques and devices in other periods and contexts, thus creating a mixed brother- and sisterhood of writers and/or translators having illustrated an unconventional poetics. Moreover, he does so by going far beyond the usual suspects such as Gertrude Stein or Jacques Roubaud and their many followers.

The second dimension concerns the way in which “shifty” translations exceed the mere move from one language to another. Instead, the author convincingly shows how these works produce less a merger (which inevitably tends to forge a new homogeneity) than the lasting contamination of one language by another, and of course also vice versa for it the “shifty” translation of English into French, for instance, opens the latter to its irreducible differences with the former, this type of writing always creates a feedback loop, with thus an impact of French on further writing in English. In practice, the mutual intrusions and disruptions largely supersede the local dialogue between two languages, as demonstrated by Broqua’s back and forth translations between three or sometimes even four languages, including mandarin Chinese, a language itself torn between at least three competing forms (classic, simplified, transliterated in Latin alphabet), not to speak of course of the countless dialects in mainland China.

In the third place, the linguistic structures and patterns of “shifty” translations are explicitly called gay, in the queer sense of the word, and theorized as such, as much as they are considered form the Nietzschean standpoint of the gaya scienza. “Shifty” translations gayly and joyfully dismantle traditional dichotomies: source versus target, original versus translation, right versus wrong, etc., and so become the verbal springboard to less orthodox experiences, which equally ignore the divide between art and life.

This last point, the fusion of art and life, a traditional feature of all 20th Century avantgarde movements, foregrounds the political relevance of what cannot be reduced to mere playing. “Shifty” translations aim at changing human and thus social relationships, thus reactualizing the program of the non-separation of the personal and the political.

Gaiamen is the dizzying exemplification of these multiple stances. Its starting point is the homophone translation of Homer’s Iliad by gay poet David Melnick (1938-2022) in Men in Aida (1983), a translation that migrates the love story of Achilles and Patroclus to the coded queer language of the San Francisco gay saunas. Here are the first three verses:

mēnin aiede thea pēlēiadeō Akhilēos

oulomenēn, he muri’ Akhaiaois alge’ ethēke,

pollas d’iphthimous psukhas Aidi proiapsen

Men in Aida, they appeal, eh? Aday, O Achilles.

Allow men in, emery Achaeans. All gay ethic, eh?

Paul asked if team mousse suck, as Akida, pro, yaps in.

The intermediary layer is a response to and continuation of Melncik’s work by John Chalslie, Men in Gaiamen (an intriguing intermediary, still unidentified by today’s search engines, but anything but a hoax in the conventional sense of the word: here as well, Broqua succeeds in pushing the boundaries – but of what exactly: it’s up to the reader to decide). The (provisionally) final level of Broqua’s Gaiamen book is the translation of Men in Gaiamen, yet also the public performance of its result and eventually the publication of this performance in a book that is now open to further and advanced reading and writing, in whatever language or verbal register you may like.