Sonic Bricolage

Multilingual poetry is not a recent innovation. The macaronic verse of medieval Europe playfully combined vernacular and Latin elements for humorous or satirical intent, whereas in Classical Persian poetry, maremma (or ‘speckled’) poems by Rumi and Hafez mixed Persian with Arabic, Turkish and Greek words. Equally, the Modernist poetry of Pound, Eliot and Loy is sprinkled with untranslated phrases and lines from other languages, foregrounding its porous internationalism and that ‘nostalgia for world-culture’ which Osip Mandelstam also identified as central to his poetic project. This tendency reached its apogee in the vast macaronic melting-pot of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s ‘collideorscope’ of more than sixty languages which – while obviously not poetry – indicates both the incredible richness of multilingual cross-pollination possible to writers and the undeniable challenges it presents for readers who lack the equipment to unpack all those dizzying portmanteau-words.

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s poetry reflects her complex biographical and cultural heritage. Born in Serbia to Croatian and Algerian parents, and having studied in Brussels, Vienna and Uppsala before settling in London, her work is an ambitious combination of French, English and Croatian language elements, further enriched and elaborated by diverse open forms and the incorporation of visual components such as maps and photos. Knitting Drum-Machines for Exiled  Tongues is her first collection, drawn from a period of mentorship with David Caddy. It has the added interest of being the debut publication by the imprint Tears in the Fence Books, which arises out of the excellent poetry magazine of the same name of ...