The myriad sounds made by ravens have long fascinated me. In this piece, I imagine snippets of translations of their vocalizations.These original texts were based on my own encounters with ravens which are a ubiquitous part of my home’s soundscape and sky, and I know them as clever, playful, social, curious creatures. I placed these in and around Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven – which as a child in the 1990s I first encountered in a Simpson’s Halloween special – one that follows a darker image projected onto these birds: demonesque, prophetic, mysterious, threatening.

Anthropomorphizing (attributing human characteristics to non-human entities) can be an insightful process of reflecting what we humans actually think about that non-human entity.Translation has a similar effect – the nuances in how language transforms as it is translated can reflect attitudes, beliefs, bias, etc. of the receiving culture.

As I was writing this piece I watched many ravens flying and playing outside my home, and heard their calls even through walls. At the same time, I was being constantly and delightfully distracted by my 8-month old daughter, and our interactions were full of her own discovery of sound and language as well as the literature of Dr. Seuss and other books full of rhymes, alliteration, and the nonsensical. These and the parallel poetic structures in Poe’s Raven led to the strong focus on spoken and sung text in The
Raven Translations.