Artists

Artist Bio

Poet, playwright and translator, Chris Tysh has been on the faculty of the English department at Wayne State University, Detroit since 1989, where she teaches creative writing and women’s studies. She has authored several poetry collections and completed a full screenplay based on a novel of Georges Bataille. Recently, her play, Night Scales, A Fable for Klara K, was produced at the Wayne State University Studio Theatre under the direction of Aku Kadogo. She has given numerous readings, both here and abroad. She is a recipient of a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. www.christyshpoet.com

ArtX Project Description

Title: Molloy, the Flip Side
Medium: Poetry Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: Chris Tysh will be reading an excerpt from her current project, entitled Molloy, the Flip Side, a book-length poem which is based on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, the first novel in his celebration trilogy, published in Paris in 1951. In Molloy, the Flip Side, she uses the French language in which Samuel Beckett wrote to guide her into finding a contemporary American vernacular through which the hapless narrator speaks. Tysh’s three-line stanza formation compresses Beckett’s diegetic universe, sparse as it is, and allows her to link the two texts through the projection of a new speaking subject – a funny, witty, old and disabled bum, going slowly nowhere. Tysh extends the concept of translation toward what one might call a transcreation, or transcultural dialougue. The result is a communication between continents, languages, and temporalities, which, in ghostly fashion, prolongs the life of the original like a standard translation does, but at the same time ushers in a gap and a new migatory lyric. www.christyshpoet.com