In Transit

Abstract

In Transit is a bilingual poem about the movement of music across languages, technologies, platforms, and listening communities. Rather than imagining a musical work as a fixed object that simply travels from one place to another, the poem follows a song as it is recorded, translated, subtitled, clipped, streamed, recommended, restored, misremembered, and sung again. Each act of mediation changes both the sound and the conditions under which it can be heard. Translation appears not as a transparent transfer between languages but as a form of renewed listening; digital circulation likewise produces new temporalities, publics, and forms of intimacy. Moving between the images of the human voice, headphones, screens, archives, and distant listeners, the poem asks whether a song can still be said to possess a single point of origin once it has entered other lives. It approaches musical circulation as a sequence of departures in which alteration, rather than perfect preservation, allows sound to continue.