Make it resonate!
Jen Calleja

In Make it resonate!, Jen Calleja, reflects on resonance in her work of a translator of literature, retelling stories written by people in another time and another place, and that of the five artists – Rawan AlMahrouqi, Safa Baluchi, Ruqaiya Mazar, Riham Noor Al Zadjali and Elina Brotherus – commissioned as part of our Resonance programme to produce new works in visual arts translating scores created decades ago by legendary artists: mediating them, making them theirs, ‘having a personal, which is to say, political response to them’, and regenerating them over and over again.

The essay was commissioned for the bilingual print publication Resonance 2 and published in the original English and in translation into Arabic by Daisy Vaughan in 2020.

Jen Calleja is a writer and literary translator. Her short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For is published by Prototype. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 for her translation of Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands (Serpent’s Tail) and she was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library. She writes a column on translation for the Brixton Review of Books and is writing an autofictional work on being a literary translator as part of a PhD at UEA. @niewview