The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic

The Winnipeg : The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic is inspired in a personal story rooted in historical events of the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish and Chilean Historical Memory, and interconnected with the involvement of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the evacuation and rescue of 2,350 Spanish civil war exiles, including my own grandfather, from French concentration camps to Valparaiso (Chile), on the cargo ship The Winnipeg in 1939. The website of The Winnipeg: The Boat of Hope, contains background information about the interdisciplinary research project: user generated content with submission of stories from relatives, names of passengers, the e-poem, Neruda’s intervention in this cause, credits and historical references. The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic, is a multi-linguistic sea of networked poetic interactive narratives fed by the stories from posts uploaded to the website. The interlacing of the stories increases with the number of posts, resulting in an on-going community-based poem at the heart of the work. The stories the contributors upload have been translated into French and English. The research process is fully explored and thoroughly enquired in the Published article: Research Paper, (2019) “The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic” in Hyperrhiz special issue “Other Codes / Coid Eile: Digital Literature in Context”. Karhio A. & Seica A. (eds.) (Peer-reviewed) http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz20/moving-texts/2-mencia-the-winnipeg.html.. This work has been used as case study of the project A Transatlantic Take on Translating Electronic Literature: a collaborative project funded by the FMSH/Mellon Transatlantic Program in Collaborative Digital Humanities. The researcher’s contribution has been to investigate the poetic space through digital design and programming while exploring translation as a creative compositional process and a shared creative practice. This is discussed in the co-authored published article “ Mencia, M. Pold, S & Portela, M, (2018 )“Electronic Literature Translation: Translation as Process, Experience and Mediation”, Electronic Book Review. (Peer-reviewed)