Kaza, Madhu: Lines of Flight

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Publication Date: May 1, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Taking a turn from Édouard Glissant into the realm of flowers, mountains, and history, Madhu H. Kaza's essay wanders through a landscape of translation shaped by delight and error. Lines of Flight follows echoes and associative logics across cultures and eras, from Ancient Greece to thirteenth-century Japan to sixteenth-century Mexico, to our own time, in an attempt to unfix translation and dwell in the ongoingness of language. This pamphlet is part of UDP's Sentimental Ed series. Sentimental Ed publishes theoretical texts (including scholarly and research-based work) that enact their arguments through the poetics of text, the materialities of book design, and other experimental forms of theory-in-practice. In solidarity with scholars and thinkers that resist demands for objectivity and views-from-nowhere, this series offers a space for experimental scholarship that is rigorous, speculative, intersectional, playful, personal and relational. Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist, and educator based in New York. She is the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that connects migration to translation, and which features diasporic and BIPOC translators. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative where she served most recently as Assistant Dean of the Microcollege. She teaches in the MFA Writing program at Columbia University.