Duplex is both a poem and a form. The repetition of the second line of each stanza as the first line of the next, makes questions,to question, breaths to breathing and light to light.
"I asked several artists, who I imagined could relate/ meditate/ absorb some of Duplex. Denise Ferreire da Silva & Valentine Desederi read the poems' Tarot. Christodoulos Panayiotou translated Duplex to the Greek-Cypriot dialect in Greeklish, the use of the Latin alphabet. Alix Eynaudi's translation is a movement exercise, and Natasha Ginwala chose an image from the Mugal period. Meanwhile translations to Portuguese, Polish, Spanish and Arabic hold surprise and witness to the folding and unfolding of this poem.
Translations are greedy (the need for more) they are a sort of re-mix, a dance, they are true and untrue. The artist's voice has potential for the sort of recklessness of imagination that I am looking for now."
–Jericho Brown, author of three poems, Please (New Issues, 2008), The New Testament and The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2014 and 2019 respectively), collections of and is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
This series of translations was co-produced by fivehundred places and V-A C Press is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.
fivehundred places is an independent publication founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. With a single printing of 500 copies, each book will find itself in one of 500 places. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.