Cadaveri: (im)possible translations
The collaborative project Cadaveri investigates the relationship between text, voice and sound across a series of strategies derived from the researchers’ shared interest in baroque aesthetics and techniques. The project is centered upon the eponymous poem (1981) by Argentine poet and queer activist Néstor Perlongher, a powerful elegy for the desaparecidos of Argentina’s 70-80s military dictatorship, featuring repeating, visceral, and often surreal imagery to confront state terror and restore corporeity to the victims. The style blends Neobaroque aesthetics (complex, ornate language) with “neobarroso” imagery (“muddy-baroque”), reflecting the grime of everyday life in peripheral and marginalized contemporary contexts. In Perlongher’s use, language is haunted by its immanent and divergent declinations: Cadaveres abounds in popular, archaic, obsolete terms, as well as in impossible words such as neologisms, onomatopoeia, portmanteaus and other “sins of the mouth.” Our project entails making the linguistic and poetic techniques in Cadaveres react with musical strategies derived from the baroque. Beyond its historical periodization, the baroque is here understood as “a trait” (Deleuze 2006), a bundle of practices aimed at decentering, divergence, overflowing and proliferation. Cadaveres thus enacts a baroque exploration of Perlongher’s voice, across four strategies: A bridge is built across our two mothertongues (Spanish and Italian). Neither of us is a translator, but across false friends, consonances and communalities of both languages we work at a two-headed “impossible” translation of the poem. The original recording of Perlongher’s reading of the poem is studied, and his idiosyncratic vocal inflections are turned into melodic lines. New forms of accompaniment or basso continuo are explored to underline the intrinsic rhytmicality of the poem at the textural as well as syntactic level. Micro-affects are individuated and sonified in the search of a short circuit between sense and sensation. Across these techniques we explore possible mixtures of logic and nonsense, of strict machinic rules and of unhinged imaginative overabundance. This presentation is not a finished output, but rather a glimpse into this work-in-progress through a video/sound installation featuring snippets of the strategies explored so far.