Piercing and Fainting

I have only fainted two or three times, to my knowledge. Each of these incidents was triggered by a breach of some kind. It is possible that the piercing of a membrane triggers my reaction.

The most significant time that this happened was when, as a 14 year old (or thereabouts), I watched a slide show of a cataract operation. A representative of a charity was demonstrating, through a narrative constructed of images, a remarkable new kind of scalpel. The new invention was a scalpel, with a diamond for a blade, attached to a fibre-optic cable allowing the tool to act as a light source for itself. Ingenious, and a great improvement on the traditional metal scalpels that cast shadows onto the surface to be cut. The charity representative wanted us to raise money for these scalpels to be bought in order that they could be used in the Third World.

While watching this slide show, from the first row, I passed out. I came round at home. It’s one of the great lacunae of my life. I’m not sure, but I reckon I fainted at the moment the tip of the scalpel pierced the cornea.

The other times I have been close to fainting generally relate to drawing blood. As a 10 year old I underwent a minor dental operation and in preparation for that, I had to give a blood sample. This was in the mid-1970s and the technique employed was a lot less efficient than the one used now. A nurse pierced my thumb with a scalpel blade (metal, not diamond), and placed a capillary tube on the cut. The meniscus of the blood, through capillary action, was supposed effect the filling of the tube. Perhaps, on reflection, my blood pressure was the agent here, but whatever happened, it didn’t work. The red liquid crawled up to about half-way. A second nurse took over and stabbed my other thumb – a violation, rather than a procedure – and filled the tube in moments. Afterwards, my vision closed in about me and I could hear my blood pumping in my temples. I was guided outside and sat with my head between my knees and slowly felt better. I remember vividly the concrete steps and brick walls of the tatty courtyard in which I came to.

The third, and strangest, of all my remembered fainting incidents was when a biology teacher (this must have been about the same time as the cataract episode), explained how an amniocentesis is taken. Like all science labs in the school, we were sat on high stools, rather than chairs and I recall lolling back to rest on the bench behind me. I don’t think I actually passed out completely, but I know that I felt strange, but not nauseous. No-one ever mentioned it, so perhaps my self-image of the reaction is exaggerated and wrong.

So, when a surface is pierced, I am likely to react. The action, which reveals something fundamental, seems a violation. I want the surface to remain intact and available for inspection in its recognisable form.

Four Tests: A tentative definition of translation

I am in the process of preparing a paper for my 'upgrade' or 'consolidation'. It marks the next hurdle of the PhD and means that I'm about a third of the way through.

It comprises a presentation of a about 9000 words, within which is a literature review, a description of methodologies and some speculation on what the outputs and outcomes might be. In short, it's a big deal. I may end up posting the basic content here in bite size chunks, but for now I wanted to post one small section.

Below is a proposition for testing whether something is or isn't a translation. Astute readers will have spotted that I'm not actually translating from one linguistic language to another, but am in fact thinking about a visual idea of translation. At the moment I'm making drawings of extant art installations by others. I need to identify that what I do is – or might be – plausibly considered as translation in order to draw on some the theory and discourse around that subject. By creating some simple tests, in the form of questions that generate a 'yes' or 'no' answer, I had a hunch I could create a working definition of translation that would separate that kind of reiteration from other, more mimetic, types, such as replication.




Four questions were devised in order to interrogate different types of copy. Considering objects through the filter of these questions allows a working definition of translation to be generated.

• Is the new version bespoke? 'Bespoke' meaning that the process of making relies on the on-going, qualitative, judgement of a maker, rather than the employment of a fully automated process. If not, the object is not a translation.
• Is the precursor to the new version a particular, identifiable object? If not, the object is not a translation.
• Is the new version an ectype? That is, is the object indistinguishable from another copy – a peer-object – made in the same way? If so, the object is not a translation, but rather a mass-produced item.
• Is the new version made with intention of being passed off as something else? If so, we are in the realm of forgery and fakes and the object is not a translation. This final test captures something of the intention of the resulting object, which will be covered below.

A translation, therefore, can be defined as a bespoke version of a particular precursor – distinguishable from another version made in the same way – that does not seek to pass itself off as something other than what it is.

Defined like this, a drawing of a photograph can be considered as much a translation as a German to English translation of Kafka.

The Task of the Translator - redux

I had an idea. I copied a translation of Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator and deleted all but the first and last sentences of each paragraph.* It seemed to me that each sentence starts with a bold proposition, which the paragraph then works through. The final sentence is a mini-conclusion of sorts. Consequently, the redux version of this essay (presented below), works as a kind of note version of the work.

It demonstrates Benjamin's skill as a writer as much as anything, and serves as a model for good practice.

In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original? If the original does not exist for the reader’s sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?

Translation is a mode. For this thought is valid here: If translation is a mode, translatability must be an essential feature of certain works.

Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability. The life of the originals attains in them to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.

Being a special and high form of life, this flowering is governed by a special, high purposiveness. Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.

With this attempt at an explication our study appears to rejoin, after futile detours, the traditional theory of translation. Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.

If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translations, this is not accomplished through a vague alikeness between adaptation and original. Translation keeps putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test: How far removed is their hidden meaning from revelation, how close can it be brought by the knowledge of this remoteness?

This, to be sure, is to admit that all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages. As translation is a mode of its own, the task of the translator, too, may be regarded as distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet.

The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original. Its products are less sharply defined, but it leaves no less of a mark on history.

If the task of the translator is viewed in this light, the roads toward a solution seem to be all the more obscure and impenetrable. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.

Fidelity and freedom in translation have traditionally been regarded as conflicting tendencies. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed, how language differs from language almost the way dialect differs from dialect; however, this last is true only if one takes language seriously enough, not if one takes it lightly.”

The extent to which a translation manages to be in keeping with the nature of this mode is determined objectively by the translatability of the original. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.

*I used Harry Zorn's problematic translation from Lawrence Venuti's Translation Studies Reader. See here for a PDF of the entire book which includes, in the essay's footnotes, an assesement of the problem.

Reblogging a link

This is more for my own benefit. I found an essay about Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator and wanted to keep a link handy. It's worth a read.

http://arewelostintranslation.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/review-of-walter-benjamin-task-of.html

The Museum of Copying

image © designboom

At the 2012 Venice Architectural Biennale, UK based firm FAT (Fashio, Architecture and Space) created the Museum of Copying. Consisting of a two-part mould of Palladio's Villa Rotundo, it plays with ideas of replication and the status of originality. Palladio's designs were copied all around the world from pattern books and have become a byword for taste and elegance as well as harking back to Rome, which replicated Classical Greece's buildings. So, nothing much original there, then.

From the FAT website:

For some time FAT has been interested in the idea of the copy in architecture. The copy is a foundation of architectural culture, evidenced for example by the influence of the Grand Tour on the creation of the English Baroque. Copying are repetition is also embedded in the way architecture is produced, in modularity of components and the keystrokes of digital drawing. Yet the copy also threatens fundamental disciplinary concerns of originality, authorship and authenticity. It’s the schizophrenic nature of the copy as the discipline’s perfect and evil twin at once fundamental to architecture and its nemesis that fascinates us.

Titled The Museum of Copying, our project presents a series of projects that investigate the complicated relationship between architecture and copying.

Centrally placed in the Arsenale is FATs large scale facsimile of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda titled “Villa Rotunda Redux”. The Villa Rotunda is perhaps the Ur example of the architectural copy. It is a building composed out of copies – an assemblage of temple and Pantheon, arranged to produce a radically new architectural typology. It has been the subject of multiple exercises in replication across time and space, from Chiswick House (London), through Monticello (Charlottesville) to contemporary examples including Beit Falasteen in the Palestinian Territories. As both subject and object, the Villa Rotunda presents us with an unfolding narrative of architectural copying. On the occasion of the Venice Biennale, we feel it appropriate to return a version of the Rotunda back to Venice in a state resonant with the condition of the copy that Palladio helped to propagate.

The facsimile is fabricated by a process that places reproduction and repetition at its core. A quarter section of the Villa was produced by CNCing a large scale mould. From this, a cast was taken by spraying into the mould with polyurethane foam. The cast and mould are arranged as an installation, displaying the process of fabrication as well as the qualities of positive and negative, of interior and exterior and the abstractions and fidelities of the original Villa, set one against the other.

Writing

I have found starting the writing of this PhD particularly hard. Anyone who knows me will know that I am garrulous and never lost for words. I am attracted to new and peculiar ideas and had hoped that this drive would underpin my research. I am learning, however, that what is required is a more dogged and methodical approach.

There is a paradox in the middle of my research, which isn't helping, either. I want to demonstrate that the work of art sits in a necessarily infinite web of relations whether the artist wants it too or not. It's an argument against ideas of purity and for complexity. The paradox is that to make that case -- and it will only ever be a case, more or less persuasive -- I need to focus on what really matters. This amounts to an essentializing (somewhat), of the area of study; to hang on to key ideas or recurring themes and to stake out a territory in which I can make claims and test them.

Furthermore, I am convinced of the importance of the art object, and acknowledge its importance as an impervious thing in the world that can rebut appropriation, including that by the artist, whose views should be taken on as seriously as anyone else's. That is, no more or less important.

So, it has become important to claim an area of specificity -- a locale or postcode -- in which to operate.

There are two types of works that I intend to 'write to': mine and others'. I consider my own works as speculations and tests. I can see their failings in terms of my ambitions for them, whereas I am probably more generous in tone when considering the work of others. There's not a lot I can do about that. If I refuse to argue that any resulting thesis is proveable, I can make no claims for objectivity, but do not valorise subjectivity, it's proposed obverse. I am stuck inside me and my thoughts and opinions are driven by what I know and care about. They are conditioned and contingent by all that I am and by all that surrounds me, including my ignorance. There will always be another paper to read, another book to borrow.

So why is writing so hard? Finding a place to start is tricky. If this text were a drawing, I would simply begin with the junction of highest contrast, an edge, a place that separates the deepest tone from the lightest.* I would then start to plot the extremes of the image, but with constant reference to the first set of marks. Perhaps this is how the writing should start, too.

---

*From the very first, I have been drawn to describing edges in drawings. During my early days at art school, I looked at the work of Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. I became aware that, although sharing stylistic similarities, they are not aligned in ideology or outlook. I simply liked the facets that made up the pictures. Even today, if I doodle, the resulting image is likely to evolve into a high contrast image. full of divisions.

Synonyms for Copy

archetype
carbon
carbon copy
cast
clone
counterfeit
cover version
ditto
double
duplicate
ectype
effigy
ersatz
facsimile
fake
forgery
hard copy
image
imitation
impersonation
imprint
iteration
likeness
microfiche
mimeograph
miniature
mirror
model
offprint
parallel
pattern
photocopy
photograph
photostat
portrait
print
re-enactment
reflection
replica
representation
reprint
reproduction
rubbing
similarity
simulacrum
simulation
study
tracing
transcript
twin
type
version
xerox