Intro Poem by Kate Fox
Poet in Residence at EX:CHANGE 2026
Written on Tuesday 30th June after the reception attended by the Mayor of Milton Keynes
Here we are at EX:CHANGE
in this city which compared to other ones
feels strange,
its 100,000 children
out of 300,000 inhabitants
speaking 91 languages
and they still want 100,000 more,
have a Mayor who gets
that translation
is how you make peace
make love, make business,
make war.
This city with its grids and plans
some of us have felt as a dystopia,
they say it’s got no soul,
with its lack of desire lines,
its Hs and Vs
but it’s got over 20 million trees
you’re never more
than half a mile from a park,
Midsummer Boulevard
lines up with the sun
on the summer Solstice,
this place built for how the future
was going to be
and now the future’s a present
something to make together
even when you can’t fully see
in this liminal time
in a room of creative minds
who can nerd out
about where an apostrophe should be,
who’ve come to gather
re-meet, renew,
reaffirm the value of what you do
How translation
to quote RF Kuang’s novel Babel
in a quote hung on Gerald’s wall
“from time immemorial has been the facilitator of peace…
makes possible communication
which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy
trade and cooperation
between foreign peoples
that brings prosperity to all”
The paradox
of how translation and interpretation
done well
should be transparent as a window,
invisible,
not announcing itself like a neon sign
over the front door,
the art and craft of it
like the foundations of a house
without which
agreements, court cases,
treatments,
instructions, good will
can fail and fall.
It’s a bit like a poem;
they’ve seen a Hallmark greeting card
so anyone thinks they can write one.
With A.I anyone can do a translation-
or at least a shite one.
Culture, context, nuance,
specialist knowledge
accountability for getting it right and wrong
the value-added list of your work is long;
nearly eighty years
since a paper said translation
would be one of the best uses
of a computing machine
the case for humans craft and heart and art in it
is greater than it’s ever been.
Here, in Milton Keynes,
where there’s more bridges than Venice,
the UK’s first Multiplex cinema
and water birth
where Bletchley’s Enigma cracked
the code,
your precise, open minds gather
at this strange time on earth
where sixty years ago
there were only fields
where shifting future visions yields
a chorus of greater voices
than the original scope,
new pathways, new ways of living
and co-operating, new hope.
Not dystopia or utopia
but recognising where you really are-
a throughtopia;
ready to be, to misquote Obama, changier and hopier.
Every interpretation and translation
must accept imperfection,
the inevitability of a gain and a loss,
who better than translators
to embrace this
to help carry us across.