Pamphlet Four - Making Nothing Happen: On Poetry and Translation As Tools for Resistance

calque ideas

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Calque Ideas provides an opportunity for writers to think aloud, using their own experiences and knowledge to approach topics in an accessible and attractive way.

This brief essay addresses the idea of poetic activism, and poetry as activism. Womack discusses some of their experiences as a poet on the edge of various political groups, charged with using poetry to change people's minds or to highlight various kinds of injustice. The conclusions they come to are that we need to think of poetry less as a tool for effecting actual change in the world, but rather a complement to determined and focussed political action.

author: James Womack
pages: 18

James Womack is a Cambridge-based poet and novelist. He studied Russian, English and translation at University, and received his doctorate, on W.H. Auden’s translations, in 2006. He lived in Madrid from 2008 to 2017, and now teaches Spanish and translation at Cambridge University. He is a freelance translator from Russian and Spanish concentrating mostly on poetry. He has published three collections of poems, all with Carcanet: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017, Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize), and Homunculus (2020), a book-length meditation of the Elegies of the sixth century Roman poet Maximianus. His most recent translations are Heaven, by Manuel Vilas, a selection of poetry by Vladimir Maiakovski, both published by Carcanet, and new translation of The Hive by Nobel Prize Camilo Jose Cela, published by the New York Review of Books classics collection in 2023.

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