Joseph, Hankinson; (2018) ‘great words carrying the world’: Intercultural Translation in B. Kojo Laing’s ‘No needle in the sky’. Moveable Type , 10 , Article 4. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.083.

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Abstract

This article will analyse the role of intercultural translation in one of the poems collected in Godhorse, ‘No needle in the sky’. It will show how Laing’s engagement with influence – particularly the poem’s use of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ as a model – prefigures the emphasis on intercultural exchange which characterises his later works. By returning to the poetry, I hope to draw attention to the ways in which the concerns of Laing’s later works are also the concerns of his earliest writings, and to suggest ways in which recent criticism could reposition its arguments in light of this. Ultimately, it will be proposed that Laing’s uses of intertextuality in Godhorse can act as a template for what Fredric Jameson has called an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’, or a ‘pedagogical culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system’ – an aesthetic which Jameson suggests might be used as a corrective to the stagnating and isolating tendencies of much of late capitalism.

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