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Process Comics

By Heather Simon ·

From words to watercolors.

“Process Comics” is a convergence of visual translations of Spanish poetry and personal essay. While translating the collection Ultramar by Elsa Cross, I decided to experiment with ways visual art might contribute to an emotive, sensual, or surreal element lost in translation. Overtime however, I began to worry that my images might obstruct the readers’ ability to feel their way around the poems.

Even once I decided I didn’t want to incorporate my images into my translations, I still continued to paint while translating. The process of painting my own interpretations of Cross’s poems became a large part of my translation process. Through the act of distilling the world of a poem in a single moment, I was better able to recognize what themes should step forward and what should whisper below the surface.

As I worked, I wrote down my reflections on this translation process. I then decided to abstract and embed fragments of these reflections into the images. The shifting context allows words I initially wrote as prose to function as poetry, completing the project’s creative circuit from poetry to visual art to prose and back again.

~Heather Simon

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Heather Simon

Heather Simon is a California native with an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College where she currently teaches. Her written and visual work often converges, drawing inspiration from the ocean, mythology, astronomy, and skateboarding. Recent print and online publications include, Ink Brick, Nomadic Sojourns Journal, Blunderbuss Magazine, The Rumpus. See more at www.inkmonstersink.com

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We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.

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