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Ami Xherro is a poet, artist and educator originally from Tirana, Albania, and currently based in Toronto. She is the author of a chapbook, The Unfinished Flame of the Lower Oceans (Swimmers Group, 2017), and other poems. As a member of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective, Ami seeks to de-instrumentalize language across tongue and media. She holds a BA and MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a garden theatre play.
“Vowels are the timeslots of the imagination: in the closing mouth there is a wind of uncertainty: the vowel. It can be elided or it can be elongated. It decides the syllable which decides the meter. Much is to be found there: a sigh of relief or regret, the voluptuousness of fulfilled desire, the veiled fuckwish, or the juice of the near-knowable. The non-fixity of the vowel, the emptiness which gives way to radical possibility seeps into the word, into the space where the word dissipates.
In this piece, I respond to a Paul Celan’s ‘Musselheap’ (from Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, translated by Pierre Joris) by reducing it to its vowels, rewriting them according to my own phonetic system (my tongue), and recording myself reciting it underwater. This translation appears on the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective’s upcoming album, generously funded by the Goethe Institut.”
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