Translation

Luke McMullan is prising the nails out of the lyric and holding it ethically accountable for any passivity that might lurk in its corridors. This is a call to occupy, to resist the feasting and destruction. As 'we all dance the liberty frogmarch', he reprocesses the responsibilities of speculating and creating the spectacle of consumer lives. What stuns in this sequence is the performative quality of the work as it negotiates subtle moments of utterance and gesture. — John Kinsella

‘The Ruin’ is the remaining fragment of an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem that describes the collapsed arches and rubble-strewn site of the old Roman baths at the city of Bath. Here Luke McMullan offers a translation in two strands that cross—poem and gloss—with the generous gift also of a scaffolding: word-tables that reveal for a reader the possible constellations of meanings of the poem’s key words, situating this gorgeous text within the history of its previous translation. —Lisa Robertson