(MIS-)TRANSLATION: A WORKSHOP

“What makes translation interesting and valuable and productive (of knowledge, of the new thing, of pleasure) is its necessary failure.” – Fred Moten, “B 31”

This generative writing workshop gestures outward from the “necessary failure” in the act of translation, taking cues from translation theory, conceptual writing practices, drag, and poetic ekphrasis. Designed for artists, writers, and translators – especially those just getting started – this course will seek to develop an activated, unlawful space of (mis-)translation through writing, reading, moving, speaking, remembering/forgetting, collaborating and actually translating texts, in an effort to depart from the expectations of perfection, servility, mastery and fidelity often demanded of translators. We will also ask questions like: How do we translate an object, a painting, a dance, into text? Is a review a translation? Is gossip social translation? How do we translate glossolalia, idioms and euphemisms? Participants should come with a text or a short series of texts they would like to “translate.” Participants do not need fluency of the original language of their chosen text(s); rather, a general familiarity and desire for intimacy with it will do. Our classroom language will be English, and we will focus on translating our texts into English, with some excursions into German, with translators Marie Beckmann and Rudi Burkhardt.

Zack Darsee (he/him) is a poet, translator and publisher based in Berlin. Alongside Nadia Marcus, he is the co-founder and editor of TABLOID Press. In 2025, he was the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing, Teaching and Publishing. He has facilitated poetry workshops in various arrangements of community since 2015, in addition to teaching creative writing courses at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry). He is the author of BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions, 2022) Anzündkind (The Creative Writing Department, 2023), and the collaborative lyric novel written with Elise Houcek, From The Pocket of Agent Dickinson (Inside the Castle, 2025). His translations of the German performance artist and poet Mara Genschel’s Reference Plot are forthcoming from Circumference Books. He is currently the co-director of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

Marie Beckmann (*1997 in Herzberg am Harz, Germany) is based in Vienna where she works as an artist, writer and translator. She holds a degree in Philosophy and Cultural Theory and is currently completing her Master’s in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Since 2021 she has been working as a publisher and editor at Merve Verlag. Her texts and translations have been published in Synchron Magazine, New Toni Press, Merve Verlag and März Verlag. She is the first German translator of Valerie Solanas’ 1965 play Up Your Ass, forthcoming from März Verlag.

Rudi Burkhardt is a German poet who is interested in constraint-based writing and gestural, performative speech. His last collection Fragmente einer echten Ikone („Fragments of a real icon“, 2024) features mistranslations of love poems by the Italian renaissance poet Francis Petrarch. Teaching and talking about writing are a central part of his practice which he might even prefer over sitting alone at his desk. He holds a degree in Creative Writing from the Literature Institute in Leipzig, is trained as a writing tutor and part of the multilingual literature and translation collective Wiese مرج (wie es ist).