Poster Slamming

At the TEI 2013 member conference today, I had the pleasure of participating in the “Poster Slam”, a well established TEI ritual in which each poster-presenter is given one minute (and one slide) to introduce the topic of their poster as a means of persuading people to come to it. Preferably in verse. This year, Syd made the fatal mistake of allowing presentations in languages other than English, providing they were accompanied by a translation. So Nicolas Larrousse and I naturally presented the following poem:

Le Tageur et L’Archiviste

Le tageur ayant tagué tout l’été
Se trouva embarrassé l’avenir étant arrivé.
Pas un seul petit morceau
d’explication claire de ses travaux

Ze tagger having tagged all summer long
Found himself embarassed when the future has arrived
Not one little bit of explanation survived for all his efforts

Il alla chercher des avis malins
Chez l’archiviste son copain
Le priant de lui prêter
De la sémantique pour tout regler.

E went to ask some tricky advice from his friend ze archivist
Begging im to lend him some semantics to sort sings out

Les archivistes ne sont pas créateurs
C’est là leur moindre défaut.
Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-il à cet emprunteur.

But archivists are not creators, that’s their smallest problem
What did you do during the fine weather?
He asked the borrower

– Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je taguais, ne vous déplaise.
– Vous taguiez ? j’en suis fort aise.
Eh bien! transformez maintenant.

Day and night I was tagging for anyone, if you dont mind
You were tagging? Oh that’s fine. So now you can do transformations!

Nicolas did the English bits, and I did the French bits, under the inspiration of the late great C. Trenet.

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