Merely Draff

A parenthetical from The Grundrisse

2010-05-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

(To compare money with blood---as suggested by the word 'circulation'---is just about as apt as Menenius Agrippa's comparison between the patricians and the stomach. It is no less false to compare money with language. It is not the case that ideas are transmuted in such a way that their particular nature disappears and their social character exists alongside of them in language, as prices exist alongside goods. Ideas do not exist apart from language. Ideas that have first to be translated from their native tongue into a foreign tongue in order to circulate, in order to be exchangeable, constitute a slightly closer analogy; but the analogy here lies not in the language, but in their being in a foreign language.)

This is probably the loveliest thing I've read in a week. At least since I finished my papers at the end of the semester. What I like the most is the way that, in the midst of a discussion about the transition to a money-system, Marx cannot avoid talking also about language; he feels the need to ward off this notion that the sharing of a metaphor makes these material things of a kind. But, he's also not willing to separate ideas from language. In other words, it demonstrates one of the primary problems of materialist thought---it must be expressed in language, which is where the ideas live, but language isn't really adequate to the particularity of the materials involved. It slips, as when it becomes tempting to compare money and blood, because both things sieve through this shared verb, "circulate". And in the midst of this proposition about the distinction between money and language (which I should, like Raymond Williams, note that for Marx, language is a social production), with a lovely problematization of "price" (which gets eaten away once we start thinking about connotation), there's a transition into translation. For Marx here, translation is the condition of circulation (which he cautions us explicitly against taking as a generalizable metaphor, but...ah well): circulation of ideas, circulation of capital, etc. And, as Benjamin tells us, translation is a pot that you've broken and can never piece back together. So, too, do Wimsatt and Beardsley warn about this.

Does this still hold true in an era of finance capital? I'm not sure that it does. But if I hold that the epidemic isn't really an adequate metaphor for finance capital, or that Terrorflu might not be either (just for the sake of thinking such a thing through), is there anything to bring forward from this earlier set of ideas about capital and culture that are all being poured through translation? I'm not sure there is. But that will be my brain's problem for the day.

Jed Rasula, from "The American Poetry Wax Museum"

2010-03-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

The poet's voice has long been our cultural paradigm for a voice that compels assent by imputing to all who hear it an agreement about its priority. The poet's honeyed voice is a benchmark of the irresistible, the voice one cannot help but attend to. The poet's voice, complicit with a cultural voice-over, is intimately bonded to a sense of helplessness, or ecstatic inertia. Stunned with gratitude, we gape openmouthed at the sound of a voice, a voice ringing in our ears in the museum headset: the voice of the other implanted directly in our heads, a technical effect, a voice-over.

Reading "The Task of the Translator"

2010-02-23T15:38:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," and one of the things I love in this essay is the extent to which he makes it clear that one of the things translation does is to make one's own language alien--to impregnate it with the otherness of another's tongue. That's some heavy shit, right there. And it makes me think about, among other things, homophonic translation: not the Zukofsky Catallus, because that one strikes me as pretty rooted in an argument about Catallus, and the homophony becomes a means toward the expression of that argument. I've been thinking instead about the two homophonic translations of epic works that I'm familiar with (and I say familiar in a loose sense: one of these, I don't know of coming to a book format near you anytime soon, though it would be amazing if it did). One of these is David Melnick's Men in Aida, which you can download as a PDF from the Eclipse project here. And, well, if you take any time looking at it, you'll see what a hypocrite I am about calling out Zukofsky as having an argument. Maybe the better way of distinguishing would be through spatial metaphors: that Zukofsky's coming from above, but Melnick brings something up from below. I love Men in Aida, and I think it's one of the most amazing translations I've read (for things that come from the Greek, this is up there with any of Anne Carson's translations, and it's a hell of a lot more interesting than anything Stanley Lombardo has ever done). But, the homophonic translation that I've been really excited by, ever since I saw her read from it at Pyramid Atlantic Arts in...2007, maybe?...is Theodora Danylevich's homophonic translations of Beowulf. I mean, they have a feeling motivating them that is just leaps and bounds more interesting than most innovative poetry, in a general sense. Here's a snippet from a passel of the translations that are on DC Poetry's web-site:

Send word and behold wine heals everything

leave off land roving longing at you

There and hidden he stood he’ll bring the good stuff now

the icing and the outhouse; appealing, so far.

A leading Shah left the Netherlands

begging Britain unbearably sheisted

by sea and by mast there were many dead and damned

offer wedding fraternity, gilded

No hired icicle is more cold than our one

Hilltop whippings and northern wadings

Build them and burn them come on, bury my lake.

What happens when these foreign bodies come into interaction with not only their descendants but the brachiating movement from one predicate to the next is a text where the violence that inhered in the source is brought back to the surface of the language, out into its sound and rebounding back to its syntax. It finishes the sentence that Beowulf proposed around 1000 years earlier. Does it matter how close it comes to conveying the same story-content? And it makes the English language that we purport to share with one another alien to itself. As Benjamin puts the task of the translator, "it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under a spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work" (80, in Illuminations). And here, I think the discourses of purity, enslavement, liberation, etc., that Benjamin uses might not be quite apropos, but I think in some substitution of terms, one could find a fit to what it is that this sort of translation work does.