Making language: impetus, workshop and visual languages
Harriet Edwards and Yen-Ting Cho
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice vol 6 no.1
Report on a workshop that arose out of awareness of the difficulty of translating Chinese or Japanese into English. English has the ability to be very precise. Chinese has no articles, tenses, phrasal verb prepositions (e.g. look up, look out), participles or auxiliaries. Translation has to be loose, open.
The authors became interested in language rooted in pictograms. This is very evident in early forms of Chinese calligraphy but there are some traces visible in contemporary characters. They decided to try out some exercises to engage imaginatively with this.
Participants were given a theme, 'summer spaces' and asked to draw images that they connected with this. In pairs, they were asked to guess at the meanings of these, and they were given 'loan words' and 'compound words' (?) to expand the language. After sharing their experience of this, they were invited to write a haiku or imagist poem - presumably using the language they were developing - and to translate it to their partner either in English or/and using sound or gesture. (This last part was a little unclear)
I found myself fascinated by this and wanting to try it out for myself. What is it like to write a language based on imagery, on the visible world? What are its possibilities, its limitations? How might this connect in to my - as yet to be developed - meaningless calligraphy? I like the participatory aspect of it.
yen-ting.cho@network.rca.ac.uk
harriet.edwards@rca.ac.uk
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