In Mijenadaha, I work with literary marginalia, transforming the translator’s notes on selected poems from Atemwende (Celan, 1967) into a large-scale textual installation. By layering, linking, citing, and weaving text into text, each poem becomes a terrain that resists conventional borders— be they linguistic, geographic, or disciplinary. By focusing on the personal and poetic, Mijenadaha becomes a new model for translation: one that fosters association, ambiguity, and subjectivity––a translation inseparable from the translator. Inseparable from myself.
In his Meridian speech, Celan described navigating a fraught terrain, a ‘Kinder-Landkarte’,1 where neither words nor places can be located. My Mijenadaha embodies that terrain. It connects, converses with, and inhabits our, at times shared, ’wordcaves’.2 Through annotation, commentary, and citation, I close myself within the windowless room until each translation, each poem becomes a world of its own: a blueprint of what emerged while dwelling with(in) the poem. Like Celan, I have no other landscape. Like Celan, I searched for land, searched for language, and found the meridian.