But in a more elemental way I think translation demonstrates things about how we move through language as we engage in writing practice. In Walter Benjamin’s seedy essay The task of the Translator, language reaches out through the many languages of (wo)men and takes form in an embryonic and intensive way. The life of the literary work flowers anew and abundantly. The work flowers but the seed of language hangs inside in half-realised fits of reciprocal relations. Whether or not we want to completely take on Benjamin’s messianic notion of pure language – this is a bigger question than an introduction could take on – surely when we write we move, be it through or towards, the language in which we write and think. The translator feels this almost corporeally in the inevitable moments of confusion and speechlessness that fester in any translation project.

In Stuart Cooke’s translations, movement, or rather speed of movement, is paramount. Unwilling to get bogged down in theory gluts, he reminds us that translation is not just a question or an idea but an everyday reality and necessity. Languages are scraped together quickly and are always in conflict with some version of themselves; dialects, vernaculars, grammar. Cook stresses the importance of transformation over crystallisation, and points to political imperatives that can override the hopelessness that we often feel before a translation project.

Another way out of this equation is proposed by Susana Chávez Silverman’s work. As the daily exchange of people who live in bi and multilingual regions of the world shows, translation is both necessary and unnecessary, immediately evident and expendable. In a sense Chávez should be uncermoniously rejected from this collection, as her work aggressively refuses to translate. Her texts slip between two or more languages without parenthetical explanations, footnotes or glossaries. And if she or somebody else were to translate these pieces, it would require a double translation, or an inversion, which would create a mirror-text, leaving each version equally partial . But of course Chávez’s work suggests something about relation, the tightness of idiomatic expression and the arbitrary dexterity of thought. Where the fruit sticks too tightly to its skin, she throws us the whole thing to swallow. Though there is not translation in the composition of the piece, the process of its reading creates a cognitive translational space for the bilingual reader. For those who read only English or Spanish, the experience runs blank at times. But if there is such a thing as a kinship of languages, surely that benefits from this kind of intimacy. In the velocity of Chávez’s prose, rivulets start to edge towards each other between the two languages. Perhaps that is merely a trick of the eye and ear, but similar effects are found in Astrid Lorange’s and DJ Huppatz’s pieces.

Huppatz’s poems are also non-translations, though they are heavily indebted to the practice. The language is largely found language, from the ever-growing reservoirs of strange English found in NES countries. The birth of this language speaks of imperialism and an ongoing hegemonic homogenisation of language. But as the world is recreated in the image or language of dominant forces, that image becomes distorted and renovated. The receiving cultures thrust back a renewing force and the language of ‘mis-translations’ reterritorialises and revitalises a system which continually engenders its own use and therein its own transformation. These poems sample this language and imagine its poetry. This project runs the risk of all translation, of subsuming the Other, of pilfering from other cultures. And though it could seem like these poems make fun of this English, Huppatz seems to laugh more at himself and at us, at our monotone sameness, our lack of invention and novelty. By taking both a naïve wonder and serious avant-garde experimentalism to this task, he reminds us that we learn our language best from others.

Lorange’s work [Which will be added to the site soon - Ed.] is a homophonic translation of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood. We’re still talking about velocity and proximity of language, but in this case, rather than two languages coming together, we have two works in the one language. This work is an experiment on the limits of translation. The Zukofskys, along with Melnick and others have tested the limits of translation and relation between languages through homophonic translation projects. They take the idea of tuning the receiving language to the original more literally, and create strange and foreignising translations. Lorange’s work however traces roughly over the form of Thomas’s language and subtly and cleverly rewrites it.

Translators get to say the same thing again. That may not seem like a fair exchange for poor pay, constrictive contracts and weak copyright laws, but it is a special privilege. In doing so translators can get close to language. Lorange gets close to Thomas’ language despite the fact the it was composed in her mother tongue. She respeaks it for herself. There is something of eavesdropping here, overhearing and looking-over. If she is unfair to Thomas and does his work a kind of violence, she is also utterly fair to him and treats his work extremely tenderly. The violence here is the violence of all translation, and of all writing, as with each word inscribed on the page we leave unwritten others, waiting. Here we’ve presented the work as an audio piece accompanied by Thomas’ text, though it could just as easily have been formatted as a bilingual (the bi of course being slightly problematic here) translation, as parallel texts.

The idea of erasure and trace is also apparent in my live translations of a Spanish poet, Esteban Pujals Gesalí. The translation strategies attempt to engage with a movement in language in an immediate and physical environment. I’ve also included a critical piece which, though not a direct exegesis, definitely speaks to the development of this technique and the ideas that informed it. Both the audio and text formats included here are reproductions, documentations of an event, as much a cataloguing of a translation process and movement in language as textual and audio works. This collection is a continually growing archive, and we welcome the submission of more work on this theme. I sincerely hope that for now you enjoy the work.

J.S.

In his preface to Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that “one of the most urgent tasks for contemporary thought is, without a doubt, to redefine the concept of the transcendental in terms of its relation with language” (1993, p.4). Refiguring Kant’s concept of the transcendental which omitted the question of language, the transcendental “must instead indicate an experience which is undergone only within language, an experimentum linguae in the true meaning of the words, in which what is experienced is language itself” (p.4).

To undergo an experience with something involves some kind of submission to it. “This something befalls us, strikes us, overwhelms and transforms us… the experience is not of our own making… we endure it, we suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it” (Heidegger, 1971, p.57). Language requires rendition. As well as being something to which we surrender, Heidegger claims that an experience means “to attain something by going on a way” (Heidegger, 1971, p.66). We must, therefore, make some sort of movement – a movement in language – in order to gain some knowledge of our relation to language. The task here is largely one of thinking. Not a putting of questions, but a listening for what is to be put in question (Heidegger, p.71).

But language is too close to us. We find ourselves entangled and compromised by the web of language. However, if we take notice of the “peculiar properties of thought,” and look about us in “the realm where thinking abides,” we loosen ourselves from the web somewhat (p.75). When we speak, we tend to speak of things we already understand. But what concerns us regarding our relation with language is something which evades us. We want to give language the floor. What is called for is not more talk, since “discourse cannot speak its taking place” (Agamben, 1991, p.62). In fact, it is possible that we are not able to say anything concrete about our relation to language. “There is some evidence,” Heidegger states, that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words” (1971, p.81). We may only be able to submit ourselves to an experience with it and carry on our way, somehow enriched by the experience. That silent experience is what we must carry over into our writing – and translation – practice.

Just as the claim I mean what I say does not circumvent the problem of the referents of language and meaning, neither does our apparent and undeniable relation with language silence the question of an experience with language. To say I speak does not resolve Agamben’s “stubbornly pursued train of thought: what is the meaning of ‘I speak’?” (1993, p.5). Speech teaches us next to nothing about language since we are only able to simply “go ahead and speak a language” precisely because language does not bring itself to language in this context but “holds back”(Heidegger, 1971, p.59). Similarly, we understand and take for granted that we breathe air constantly, but this tells us little of air and less still of our experience of it. If we have to struggle for air however, we come closer to an understanding of our need for it. We may not understand the mechanics, but in moments of asphyxiation, we understand something about our relation with it. This also holds for language.

Heidegger explains that language speaks itself as language “when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us” (1971, p.59). It is then that we “leave unspoken what we have in mind and… language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being” (p.59). This makes sense within Benjamin’s (1968) framework also, if we imagine that in that moment of aphasia, language gives up on the business of signifying this or that object, and we find ourselves engaged in a moment of intention. Oddly, it is while we mean to say something, rather than when we have assigned a word to mean something, that we are most in contact with language as language. In Heidegger’s terminology, because we are being touched by the essence of language; in Benjamin’s because we have not yet translated pure language into fallen language. For Agamben, the split that Benjamin finds in language is still relevant, however the division is not so much between pure language and languages, but rather is “a fracture inherent in human language” (Bartoloni, 2004). In the work of Agamben, this moment of the self-presentation of language occurs in the notion of infancy:¹

Infancy is an experimentum linguae of this kind, in which the limits of language are to be found not outside language, in the direction of its referent, but in an experience of language as such, in its pure self reference. (Agamben, 1993, p.5)

The relation here to translation is evident. Translation, as a form, acknowledges its own aphasia: its impossible possibility, its “devotion to ruin,” as Derrida (2001, p.181) would have it. Having language as its only referent, it then sets about a movement toward other language, to other words. Time after time it comes upon a lack of words and paradoxically moves through pleonastic turns to overcome that loss. The translator, amongst two (in)complete systems of expression, is swamped by language yet continually at a loss for words. To return to the air metaphor, it is like breathing out of the window of a speeding car. The air rushes towards us yet we struggle to inhale. The translator has two languages on which to hold but is forever slipping between them.

It is no coincidence that my interest in the strangeness and the limits of language first asserted itself while I was living abroad. For the first time in my life I had to defend myself in a language which was not my own. I quickly began to realise the peculiar enabling and limiting force of the English language² with/in which I had grown up. To deform Wittgenstein’s maxim; until then, the limits of my world had been the limits of my language. In a new world a new set of limits set in relief the limits of my language, the limits of my world. The experience is described by Octavio Paz in which the immediate emotions one feels before an unknown language quickly transform themselves into doubts about our own language, as it “loses its universality and reveals itself as a plurality of languages” [my translation]³ (1970, p.9).

In another language, we are constantly “leaving unspoken what we have in mind” (Heidegger, 1971, p.59). In our despair at the abandonment of language, we sense the magnitude – without implying in any way a perfect relational system – of language. Wittgenstein’s statement makes sense to us, that “the correct expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, albeit as expressing nothing within language, is the existence of language itself” (quoted in Agamben, 1993, p.9). Following through Wittgenstein’s line of thought, Agamben then asks what the most appropriate expression for the existence of language is. The only possible answer, Agamben concludes, is “human life, as ethos, as ethical way” (p.9-10). Moving toward each other in language. This can double as a rationale for translation. Positioned between two languages, the translator refuses to settle in one or the other, but rather remains in the interstice, sounding out the space between the two, tuning the ear to two distinct and strange ways of movement and intention, hoping to realise a new way of approach and relation in the mother tongue.

REFERENCES

• AGAMBEN, G. 1991, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Trans. Pinkus, K. E. with Hardt, Michael, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
• 1993, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, Trans. by Heron, L. Verso, London.
• BARTOLONI, P. 2004, ‘The Paradox of Translation via Benjamin and Agamben,’ CLCWEB, electronic journal in Comparative Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, June 2004, Purdue University Press, USA, http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/.
• BENJAMIN, W. 1968,  ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,’ Trans. Zorn, H. in Benjamin, W. Illuminations, 1968, Pimlico, London.
• DERRIDA, J. 2001. ‘What Is a “Relevant” Translation?’ Trans. Venuti, L. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 2. (Winter, 2001), pp. 174-200.
• PAZ, O. 1970, Traducción: literatura y literalidad, Tusquets Editor, Barcelona

Para empezar:
Hablar es una arriesgada especie de ejercicio
y peligrosa…
…la hace su imperfección aparente-
mente más perfecta todavía…
Las palabras pueden
en cualquier momento desarticularse,
resbalarse de su segunda mano
que son, sonoridades que se quiebran
por una grieta, irregularidades
que el coleccionista valora
por la conformación
delicada de sus deformidades.
…………………….
Diremos del piano que extienden las notas
autodesafinarse haciendo al tocarlo
muy difícilmente fascinable hasta el final.

FOUR FRAGMENTS OF A POETICS

To begin:
To speak is a risky species of exercise
and dangerous…
… it makes its imperfection apparent-
ly more perfect still…
The words can
in whatever moment unjoin themselves,
slip from their second hand
that they are, sonorities that break open
at a crack, irregularities
that the collectionist values

deformities.
…………………….
We will say of the piano that the notes extend
to go out of tune, themselves
until the end.