laurenshufran's blog

“In his New Republic essay “Cool We Can Believe In” novelist/poet Paul Beatty attempts to pin down Obama’s apparent invulnerability to closet skeletons, his anti-Tar Baby immunity, to that most ineffable of blues and jazz attitudes-sans-attitude—cool. This updated stoicism, for Beatty, is the very antithesis of translation—it does not convert, change or represent. It is before all morality, outside any ethos…”

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That’s taken from Tyrone’s talk. And I’m still sitting with “cool” as a method and a mood of operation pertinent to, even as it counters, translation. For Beatty, the unaffected equipoise that is cool is precisely what does not translate, what is untranslatable (“It's not so much Barack's blackness that makes him hard to attack so much as it is his unaffected cool, because the state of being f'able is ineffable. How can you find the words to attack something that there are no words for?”).

“Cool” appears to exist as response – a response (as a sort of low-level subsistence or maintenance) that transcends its occasion so much so that it barely surfaces as response, is unresponsive… perhaps even irresponsibly so. It’s a performance of non-reaction. Consider this in light of translation’s authoritative discourse, which desires a text so “natural,” so “fluent,” that it doesn’t even seem to be translated. Lawrence Venuti, for instance, in “The Translator’s Invisibility,” suggesting all translations necessarily either foreignize or domesticate, though ironically through a translator who must remain indiscernible (read: cool?). Read more