Published with Tuumba
press. Plurilingual poetry with digitally modified video images.
Uxudo
is a musical text, although its medium is visual and verbal. The verbal component is
termed "plurilingual" by the author. Using German, English, Hungarian, French,
as well as invented words, Anne Tardos builds her poems out of sounds which reflect both
remembered and current experiences in the world. The accompanying visual image are not
mere illustrations. They emerge from a life's mysterious terrain and remain as non-verbal
memories.
From Publishers Weekly:
Uxudo—a word,
we're told, produced by computer error, and .
. . the only non-"real" word here—invites the reader into a world of . . . semantic and phonologic echoes, an effect
furthered by being grafted onto video stills . . .
From Juliana Spahr's review
in St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter:
Anne
Tardos's Uxudo is one of the more extreme examples of multilingual
writing
that I have read. It is written in English, French, German,
Hungarian,
and neologisms. On the right side of the book are words and
images
(the images are of Tardos's family). The left side of the book
contains
something that resembles translation (here it seems assumed the
reader
is fluent in English). Languages in Uxudo are often presented as
connected.
So the right side of the first piece states in part:
Panic
in the
Strassen
kein
viszivilág.
Watery
armory
hip-hop
Gefäss
(19)
And
then parallel on the left side:
viszivilág
= [vee-see-vee-lag] = viszi = carries off / nimmt mit sich /
emporte
(világ
= world / Welt / monde)
(18)
This
right and left split construction of the book points to how
connection
is the dominant compositional mode. Languages are mixed on
the
right side. The left side, connected with the right, presents
footnotes
of sort in which several languages are further connected
through
translation. And an additional connective link to this chain of
language
reference is the family photographs which appear in the
background
of many of the pages. While these photographs might feel
arbitrary,
this connection between the familiar (the family photographs;
the
meanings in the poems themselves) and the cultural (the languages)
is
crucial. This work presents a space where the familiar is
multi-vernacular.
And as there are few more consequent ideologies that
affect
our social structures than the family, these poems also point to
how
the familiar is at every level engaged with the violently contested
landscapes
of nations.
This
connective intent in Uxudo suggests that what we are dealing with
in
part is something familiar, something intimate about languages. And
one
way to read these poems is as a peculiar sort of realism for
Tardos's
life of polylingual fluency. Tardos is so fluent because her
parents
were in the French resistance and thus were constantly moving to
avoid
the rise of antisemitism that accompanied WWII. And yet to just
say
such work represents a sort of realism seems to me to also be
selling
Uxudo short. . . .
[
B]ut what interests me about Uxudo is the way that it illustrates the
complex
negotiation that is necessarily always occurring between
cosmopolitanism
and separatism. Tardos's work is cosmopolitan in
influence
and feel. Its language base is primarily European.
(Cosmopolitan
multilingualism tends to use European languages while
post-imperialist
multilingualism tends to present a wider range of
languages;
however, post-imperialist works often use English as a
dominant,
base language.) And its subject matter is more familiar and
personal
than cultural.
Yet
Uxudo, written out of languages learned in avoidance of
antiSemitism,
does not have the utopianism of Jolas and Joyce's
cosmopolitanism.
It is too aware of what comes after Jolas's and Joyce's
writings,
of the various political upheavals that have forced people to
negotiate
a range of languages. Instead of unified pluralism, instead of
melting
pots, Tardos presents a right page of joined languages (perhaps
of
cosmopolitanism) but then a left page that respectfully sorts it out
with
multilingual translations pointedly joined with equal signs. I like
to
read these lists of words joined with equal signs as a new sort of
pluralism
where languages's separations are acknowledged. Uxudo is
sensitive
to the contingency and permeability of borders yet it does not
abandon
the particularism of sovereignty, the universalism of global
culture,
or the productive tension between the two. Instead its intent
is
connective, is to encourage the cross-cultural communication desired
in
cosmopolitanism without drowning out the culturally specific voices
and
their separatist forms of survival. And so the answer to those
questions
of why, is that instead of searching for pre-Babel moments
divorced
from history and instead of suggesting we can have melting pot
pluralisms,
Uxudo suggests communities of different orders, ones full of
equal
signs that scatter. . . .
From Caroline Bergvall's
Foreword:
It is in the rapid language
switches that the plurilingual text first and foremost announces itself. It’s in the
stop-start structure which routes out the languages framed and in use, and the various
ways in which they intersect, through mixed speech, borrowings and compounds, and
neologistic sounding games, that the mechanics and polemics of such a textual environment
find themselves defined. The reader, pressed hard between words written in language they
don’t know, words written in language they know, words written in language they
thought they knew.
. . . The intricacies of
such disruptive, uprooted dealings inevitably add humourous correspondences to the work.
Nothing equals another thing equals another equals another. In cross-lingual pollination,
the linguistic sign seems as differential as any saussurean stylistics might wish for it.
And the sonic games, cross-lingual puns, private riddles and neological turns which,
rather gleefully, punctuate most of the plurilingual work I have come across, would seem
to push this point.
. . . This framed
echo-chamber does not illustrate nor translate. Nor does it erase its elements into one,
seamless, cohesive readerliness. It enriches its gymnastics of clues and games of tones
with clashes between personal grammars and social usage. Only the precision of such
divided attentions can carry off the emotive and psycho-social genealogies which the
plurilingual text is interjecting into the overall cultural body.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge:
Anne
Tardos’s Uxudo combines extreme sophistication with great warmth. By using the
linguistic, the filmic, the nonlinear, her surface becomes dimensional, what I want to
call an acute net, in the sense of crossings. Time and mourning support from the outside.
This is exciting and tremendously moving.
Ron Silliman:
Uxudo,
a gift from technology, illuminated manuscript. Illuminated not as in
“illustrated,” but luminous, interactive in a sense that Blake would have
understood. Or Zukofsky: that language is eyes. Ears, echoes. That, in fact, language
itself, in our time certainly, must always be plural: a system of differences, midrashim
to an Ur-text that never existed but perpetually surrounds us. Place exists, but entirely
as displacement. These marvelous works reveal our time with remarkable precision,
generosity and wit. Anne Tardos sees, hears, writes, films, acts with a clarity
that is breathtaking:
Ivan was terrible.
Who am I really?
Räuberträume follitude
Uxudo.
Joan Retallack:
Anne Tardos is an
extaordinary poet and visual artist who grew up in four languages—French, Hungarian,
German, and English. This did not confuse her at all. Instead it fed her sonne & licht
sense of humor. Uxudo has many dimensions. It is faux autobiography of the truest
kind. It is language play without rival—a transgeneric play of trans: (plug in
suffix) -gression, -(e)lation, -formation, -figuration. From wonderful near-paradox like
“The audience’s willingness to be amused is not to be taken lightly” to the
compound intelligence of “unique promise-foam,” “oh-deed on laudanum,”
and “Räuberträume follitude” Uxudo is another Tardos
tour-das-wunderbare!
