Roaming MitWelt: A Creative-Critical Inquiry into Ecopoetics and Ecotranslation

This creative writing thesis situates itself at a nexus between literary ecology and translation ecology to investigate contemporary ecopoetics in relation to processes of translation. Against the backdrop of a global climate emergency, ecopoetics, as a symbiosis of ecological thinking and innovative poiesis, seeks forms and expressions to engage with the ongoing destruction of an infnitely interconnected oikos. It thus participates in encounters at borders of human knowledge and perception, borders of the human skin, and borders of the human language that yet have to be explored in their translational capacities. Such an exploration is all the more called for in a controversially debated age of the Anthropocene, which is likewise dubbed an age of translation.

To that end, ecopoetics is propelled as an interdisciplinary, creative-critical edge. Self-composed poems are intertwined with theoretical considerations to navigate an attentive ecopoet(h)ics, resistant to categories, open to indeterminacy, and dedicated to weaving connections between textual and extra-textual ecologies, on and off the page. Correspondingly, translation is outlined as a creative connection-making process, expanding an interlingual framework and articulating a relational motion that necessarily entails transformation. In their shared interest in generating meeting spaces with the foreign and the unknown, translation and ecopoet(h)ics amalgamate to ecotranslation: a concept that frames its boundary compositions; a lens that magnifies power dynamics and cross-cultural layers; a relational writing practice that attends to more-than- human languages of the Mitwelt from a position of mutual entanglement.

In dialogue with reflections on my practice, readings of Cecilia Vicuña, Juliana Spahr, Les Murray, Jody Gladding, and Rita Wong substantiate these moves. Discussions of Sarah Kirsch and German ecopoetry further contribute to a German-English ecopoetic conversation, in which my own writing equally finds itself. The thesis therefore contributes to ecopoetics as a radical boundary node and translation as an experimental writing praxis. In their multiple unfolded facets, poethically reconfigured ecotranslations light up critical and imaginative interactions with a vulnerable physical-material multiverse that ultimately wager on translation as tangible action.