trANNESlation: translating the complete poems of Anne Sexton to color

About this project:

This project is a kind of experiment or an act of playfulness: an exercise in coming to terms with what is incomprehensible and ineffable in language, literature, and art. We’ve chosen as our corpus-to-analyze, via distant reading, a contentious body of work written within a customarily opaque genre: the poetry of Anne Sexton—specifically, her published poems comprising the 1981 Houghton Mifflin publication Complete Poems, which gathers her poetry from the eight books she published in her lifetime, two more books published posthumously, and seven additional poems published for the first time in that volume. What lies below are visual “translations” of her poems we’ve created based on our results from AntConc, the TopicModelingTool (a GUI for MALLET), and Voyant. Each “topic,” or machine-generated theme, has been assigned a color, which we’ve mapped onto her poems, word by word or line by line.

Anne Sexton, one of the Confessional poets of the mid-twentieth century, was a figure famously afflicted by personal troubles; her suicide in 1975 has in the public eye and in criticism at times overshadowed her poetry. We know that her private life profoundly influenced her writing, but we don’t believe that that influence can be measured, charted, or extracted from her work in any sense. In fact, it’s simply not our business. By selecting Sexton’s body of work in particular, attempting dubiously effective techniques to analyze it, and then obscuring her poetry further by converting it to multi-colored coded representations, we aim to highlight the acute difficulty in trying to explain the thematic content of poetry, and literature in general. We intend to demonstrate how unavoidably complicated it is to seek to classify the stylistic, structural, and semantic tendencies—in general, and as they are charted by AntConc, the TopicModelingTool, and other tools—of a body of work, as if its meaning is simply available to us for the taking, if we look hard enough. We choose a color-coded method of translation to further this point: Does the color red signify love or anger, or does it tell us to STOP? Color, too, is a type of language, fraught with perception-based variation, embedded in a long artistic tradition, and muddled by complex cultural associations. By tranneslating Sexton’s poetry to color, we obscure it further and come to terms with our inability to understand.