Author description: As collaborators who met at ELO 2014 and shared conversation in three languages, we are committed to working in French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and translating one another’s work across continents and media. Thus, Langlibabex is a multilingual collaboration that departs from our shared experience of reading and responding in constrained poetic forms to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel.” First, we each read and responded to the story via 40 line texts (80 characters max per line). Some themes we took into consideration were library as universe/universe as library, the concept of imperfect librarianship, gender and sexuality. Next, we translated one another’s texts into our respective languages. Some translations featured in this iteration of Langlibabex are orthodox; others engage with radical, multilingual and/or machine-based approaches to translation. Finally, we recorded ourselves reading both our own work and the translations. We created an audio shaker of these readings whose varied-yet-constrained outputs reflects the mathematical possibilities invoked in “The Library of Babel.”

Instructions: Check out the work at the Arts Library