Dr Nadia Niaz is an academic, writer and editor who is now mostly from Melbourne and still a little bit from lots of other places. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne, where she teaches Creative Writing in the School of Culture and Communication. Her areas of interest are multilingual creative expression, particularly in poetry, the practicalities and politics of translation, language use among third culture kids and other globally mobile cohorts, and interrogating the idea of ‘belonging’ in multiple contexts. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Pencilled In and Peril. Nadia is a member of the West Writers Group and the founder of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project.

Poetic encounters

Language, sound and poetry
Abstract

Sound is essential to poetry and poetry is an essential element of human language. As a simultaneous trilingual engaged in the study of multilingual poetic expression, I will use the development of my own plurilingual poetic ‘instinct’ to map the location of poetry within and between languages. I argue that poetry does not grow out of language so much as inhabits the basic aural building blocks of language, the potential for it existing always just beneath the surface of speech. This is tested by examining multilingual poetry as well as translations of poetry across languages to see what is lost and what emerges.

Keywords: Multilingual poetry – bilingual poetry – translation – code-switching – code-mixing – plurilingual poetry – sound and poetry – nonverbal communication