Gary Barwin (he) is a writer, musican and multidisciplinary artist. His new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for fiction. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize. His work includes collaborations with many writers, musicians, and visual artists, including Bird Arsonist, written with Tom Prime, published just a few weeks ago.
“One morning, I woke up seized with the idea of running Margaret Wise Brown’s classic children’s story Goodnight Moon through Google translate (Googlenight Moon?) and playing with the images and ‘translating’ the entire thing. The textual result is surprisingly rich in things other than sleep and child rabbits. For the visuals, I mostly made a video of turning the pages of the book and blurred the results. The colours (and even their location on the page) are so iconic that the effect is almost like a dream of the book. Goodnight. Goodnight.”
