Lika Tarkhan-Mouravi

Lika Tarkhan-Mouravi

[Untitled] Gouache on paper, 22×14 cm each, 2023

Plantago, video projection, 01:47 min, 2023

MARIJAN: a translation. the book of missing words, Edition 30, 2024 

(Special thanks to Ian Gabb and Sharon Lee for helping to create this publication)

How does uncertainty manifest itself in translation? The work consists of various attempts to translate a text. Failing and refusing to create seamless translations in the English language, I use various other methods, as forms of code switching, to convey the sensibility of texts. Here I deal with the disappeared texts of Marijan, a Georgian proto-feminist writer from 1920. 

The book consists of translations of Marijan’s poems. The 2 incomplete poems you were not my lover, and the eyes of a guilty dog were discovered in the archives a few years ago. They were supposed to belong to a collection of Marijan’s book Seascape from 1926. Whilst other poems were subsequently published as part of the collection, the two were never printed. In this book I create two incomplete translations of these poems, whilst filling the rest of the book with blind embossed drawings, as gestures of making visible the erasure.