other writings
Notes on The Task of the Translator / Every Word Was Once A Poem /------------------------------------------
text by alejandro cesarco, edited by gabriel perez-barreiro
This book is condemned – a multiple self imposed condemnation – to be a form of quotation.
It presents the appropriation and transference of content and draws attention to the shifts in meaning accompanying this process. [what specifically are these shifts in meaning? Can they be separated from the act of ‘drawing attention to’? Is there a process of generating meaning that becomes its own subject? So much contemporary art and culture ‘draws attention to’ things, but what are these things? Can they be named beyond a process? If process is motion and dynamic, what is the static landscape against which we measure movement? Think of the translation of ‘dirección’ as both ‘direction’ and ‘address’: motion and stasis]
In other words [nice irony!], the text is shaped after a previous text, that once reflected, becomes its own narration [although by using previous, you are assuming a chronology when it could be argued that the texts exist together, or are even simultaneously implicit in each other]. Later, these fragmentary notes become an allegory of completion.
As every translation it sets out to be a faithful repetition, but, as is known [you use the passive voice a lot. This is partially a Marxist tic, the idea that things happen in a pre-determined way], even literal repetitions (re)produce something quite different than the (original) source text. [because the passage of time generates context and meaning]
Repetition must be the same (there is sameness only if it repeats, and the only repetition is of the same), but can in no case be identical. [see above]
It is in this repetition of the same that something new is created, or at least something other.[By definition, anything other must be new. Difference=novelty, otherwise it could not be perceived as different] Already inscribed in this is a relation, a system of ethics, of responsibility toward the other [this is the first mention of a ‘warm’ subject], a trace that is the entwinement of the other-in-the-same [or of the same-in-the-other].
Language is always received / Every word was once a poem / Repetition as farce / Originary repetition / Originality of the secondary, and tertiary, and so on and so forth….. / Repetition in alterity / and so on and so forth …
Translation, as a form of appropriation, stems from admiration and jealousy (both somehow without memory). [Jealousy and admiration also require memory. There has to be a point of comparison for the emotion to arise. Think of Funes, he would be incapable of admiration or jealousy because he remembers without forgetting. Remembering is act of forgetting]
(Repetition is often a consequence of forgetting through memory (see above)).
In the process the mediator it attempts to activate individual claims of authorship to the role of the mediator. [if they are individual claims, who are the individuals?]
An economy of formal means in speaking through someone else’s words.
A form of faulty copying [assuming there is a ‘correct’ copy. See above: any copy is a reinterpretation.].
A constant complicity between writing and reading, sender and addressee, a blurring of boundaries between the agencies of “sender” and “addressee”.
A consideration of effects. In this particular case, effects of the signifier. Emotional connotations of words. [why, if it is a copy? Are the emotions also copied, or just their detonators?]
Romantic underpinnings. And later, cynicism as a form of escape [where?].
Means and Ends < ------------- > Borders of Art
Conceptual leftovers from the 70’s
[Left-overs, over-the-Left]
Extraterritoriality [80s] and reciprocity [90s]
To organize reality not to represent
it. [by using a readymade]
An urge to archive induced by cultural saturation. [catalogue of desire/consumption]
The text (in the classic Barthesean [quote of a quote of a translation] sense in opposition to work) is experienced only in an activity of production. It is a methodological field.
Translation is thus, as a special
case of reading.
A translation of a reading practice. [practice makes perfect?]
An interface between different
linguistic, literary and cultural codes [80s again]
Every text is part of a context [con-texto] which determines its possibilities
of production and reading. This context is remarked, always inscribed
[scribed-in] in [and by] the text itself, yet it is never fixed.
A speaking [writing] position dramatized [or un-dramatized, or anti-dramatized] in the performance [or anti-performance] of translation
The specificity of the language one translates.
But how does all this relate to social (situational) logic and practice?
Why translate into English? Is it to abide to the law of the majority or the law of the strongest? [both. The question is a form of linguisto-political romanticism. But that’s OK]
Derivative & [and] I[i?]ndependent text: reproduction / representation / reconstruction [Dependent and Liberated text? Territorio Libre?]
Second order observation – see: Niklas Luhman
To touch the original lightly.
Relate to appropriation strategies of the early 80’s (the picture-generation, mostly women- mostly photographers) [The Ballad of Sexual Dependency]
See: Lautremont / Marx / SI
Process of quotation / Excerptation [Spanish-ism?] / Framing / and Staging
(not in search of sources of origins, but structures of signification.) [signification=meaning? Significación? Significado?]
I’ll be your mirror
The textual presence of the translator. [the contextual absence of the author]
In-between [marginal] texts. [Texts without editing, unlike this one. A supposed purity or synthesis]
A “differential” voice.
Closer and closer apart.
Translation as interpretation.
Translation and interpretation.
Translation with interpretation
Where is the love?
Where is the author of this text? It’s impersonal.
What is the place of “love” in the ethical?.
Duplication of communicative roles.
A manipulation of literature. [manu-facture, fabricate by hand]
A[n implied] reader,; an definition of audience.
A bundle of relationships [a relationship of bundles]
An excuse. [sorry] A possibility amongst many. [maybe]
Empathic transference.
Tout choses sont dites deja, mais comme personne n’ecoute, il faut toujours recommencer.
Few things to say, yet at the same time prolific.
Very few things to say, yet never close to the last word.
The intention of this reading. [the reading of this intention]
A conceivable reason to say again [again], to repeat [again].
A sentimental education. An emotional readymade.
Midway between poetry and doctrine lies the author’s intention.
Translation as a mode, incorporates the “original’s” mode of signification [á la mode]
But what can fidelity really do for the [faithful] rendering of meaning?
Linguistic complementation.
A smile may help here. J
An intention to stay close to the cliché, to that which repeats, while forming.[Solaris. Again: memory and forgetting and formation]
The light, as usual, framing and erasing.
Reciprocity [synchronocity]
A three-tiered notion of language: rhetoric / logic / silence.
Intimacy with two languages and a text. Triangulation. A furthering of desire. Reading as a libidinal act.
Telling each other stories, listening for difference.
I like the feeling of words doing
as they want to do and as they have to do.
Gertrude Stein as quoted by Anne Carson in the Autobiography of Red, Vintage Contemporaries, New York, 1999, p.3)
By this art you may contemplate
the variation of the 23 letters …
The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV
As quoted by Jorge Luis Borges, La Biblioteca de Babel, Ficciones (Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1994, p.89)
Gosto de sentir a minha língua
roçar a língua de Luís de Camões
Caetano Veloso
Está provado que só
é possivel filosofar em alemão
Caetano Veloso
