Martha Scotford

Several years of research and graduate student experiments resulted in the publication of a facsimile edition of El Lissitzky’s designs for Mayakovsky’s poems, sometimes titled “For Reading Out Loud” and sometimes titled “For the Voice.” The final publication was a collaboration with other scholars and published by The British Library and Artists Bookworks in 2000. My work entailed an essay describing the process of both translating the poems from Russian to English, and then translating the Cyrillic characters into Roman alphabet characters with similar forms, as well as the facsimile booklet.

I also wrote an earlier essay about the project, published in Visible Language, Spring 1988. This is the abstract for that article:

Title: Verbal and Visual Translation of Mayakovsky’s and Lissitsky’s For Reading Out Loud Vol: 22.3/4 Author(s): Lange, Martha Scotford Abstract: Full understanding of visual poetry created by a linguistically different culture poses particular problems. Translations of selected poems from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s For Reading Out Loud (1923) are presented here. In addition, an attempt is made at transposing the visual wordplays found in the original Cyrillic typography into the Roman alphabet. The English reader is able to enjoy the verbal/visual dexterity of El Lissitsky’s typographic presentations of Mayakovsky’s poems. Analysis of the design process and some historical background provides a context for fuller understanding of Lissitsky’s innovative work.

For inclusion in Steven Heller’s 2011 “I [heart] Design” I wrote about one of my favorite designs: an ingenious book for the Dutch post, telephone and telegraph office. Some spreads below.