Generating Dark Matter -- Diverted and Dark Matter based on Rocío Cerón's Materia Oscura
In 2019, I watched Rocío Cerón perform Materia Oscura in Guanajuato, Mexico visiting my friend, the poet and editor, Lee Gould, who had recently established and published the bilingual journal La Presa as her contribution to a Spanish English dialogue while resident in Mexico. I was swept completely into Cerón's powerful performance and felt compelled to penetrate her words. At the time, I had begun to study Spanish in Toronto and Guanajuato: I could order a meal but had little more competence.
Having grown up in a bilingual Alberta household with a unilingual Ukrainian grandmother, I had a mother tongue child tongue competence in Ukrainian. My mother, however, frequently spoke Romanian with her family so I'd heard it spoke regularly; I have never been an adept language-learner. Such is the power of patrilineal endogamy. The block settlements of the late 19th and early 20th century produced contiguous Ukrainian and Romanian settlements.
Since my family was loosely constructed across those two communities which were linguistically distinct culturally, I had a sonic sense of Romanian but no words. While doing a Transtranslation workshop with Mark Goldstein in which we read theories of translation, I elected to begin a sonic translation from the work of the Romanian poet, Nora Iuga, in which I had the sounds but not the sense.
My previous work, Skein of Days (Pedlar Press, 2015) a survey work had specifically focussed on the language available to shared understandings based through a fractured examination of mid to late C20th largely Canadian newspaper headlines and Magazine tables of Contents. I became interested in Natural Language Processing and Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet One but failed to execute any Kurzweil imitations on my Skein database. I was primed to 'mess' with language.
Dark Matter -- Diverted is the product of just such 'messing' driven by wanting to understand more of Cerón's work, to examine early Google Translate, more of the cognate and lexical structure of both Indo-European and Uralic languages and by my own poetic that seemed compatible with Cerón's as far as I could grasp it at the time. Following the morph and flow through successive translations, both from Spanish to a single language to English or through multiple languages and back to English generated results that varied dramatically and syntactically. As with Skein of Days, the resulting texts were my compositions; they were assembled by my sensibility out of the array of words and structures provided by the various translations.
As I developed more comfort with Spanish on the page, Dark Matter took shape in a multilingual translation workshop with Erin Moure. Under her watchful eye and polyglot guidance, poets translate from Ukrainian, French and Spanish into English. I continue to translate more of Cerón's work. Her exquisite sensibility and exuberant poetic continuesto intrigue me. While none in the workshop are fluent in all languages, the accumulation of linguistic and poetic expertise generates exciting work in multiple languages. I am grateful to Erin Moure, Jaclyn Piudik and Roman Ivashkiv for their ongoing work.
Sonja Greckol (Tkaronto/Toronto Canada) books include No Hay Linea En EL Tiempo/No Line In Time (manofalsa editore, 2025) translated by Eduardo Padilla, Monitoring Station (University of Alberta Press – Robert Kroetsch Series, 2023), No Line In Time (Tightrope, 2018), Skein of Days (Pedlar Press, 2014), and Gravity Matters (Inanna Press, 2008).
Her long poem ‘No Line In Time’ won the 2017 Briar Patch Poetry Contest and No Line In Time was listed for the League of Canadian Poets Raymond P Souster Award in 2019. Monitoring Station (UAlta Press) was listed for the Alberta Book Publishers Award in 2024.
La Presa (Spring 2017)Asymptote (Jan 2025) published an excerpt of her translation of Rocío Cerón’s 'Trances' and her e-transtranslation ‘Dark Matter - Diverted’ of Rocío Cerón’s ‘Materia Oscura’ appeared in La Presa (Spring 2017). Greckol edits poetry for Women and Environments International. Greckol is a member of the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus.
