translation as social & aesthetic practice

FOR IMMEDIATE CIRCULATION; PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY

• Rides are available to this event. To offer or ask for a ride, please email carpool@nonsitecollective.org for details
• Please be aware, this event is not wheelchair accessible (or not without real difficulty)

Dear Friends,

Come see military civilizations collide!, in a special production of

Brandon Brown's The Persians by Aeschylus

Brandon's text is a literal translation of The Persians by Aeschylus, which has been adapted for a site-specific performance in San Francisco's Presidio, at the bunkers near the Golden Gate Bridge.

---

Curriculum Resources Related to the Performance

For an artist statement by Brandon Brown on his translation, as well as for additional resources regarding this event, please see the Curriculum Resources section of the Nonsite Collective blog at: http://www.nonsitecollective.org/blog/curriculum-resources/.

---

The cast for this special performance will include: John Sakkis, Cynthia Sailers, Suzanne Stein, Dan Fisher, Taylor Brady, Tanya Hollis, Lauren Shufran, and Brent Cunningham.

We suggest you bring along a blanket and a cold beer for a hopefully not-so-cold afternoon.

The performance will begin at 2pm. Rides to BART will be available afterwards, so that we all can catch the New Yipes event at 21 Grand in Oakland at 7pm, featuring novelist Steven Beachy and poet Lara Durback, with films by Martha XIV.

For more info, please see:
http://newyipes.blogspot.com/

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/blog/2007/08/24/location-change-for-the... -- IMPORTANT LOCATION CHANGE UPDATE!!
http://www.nonsitecollective.org/blog/2007/08/16/nonsite-event-brandon-b...

We hope to see you all there!!

All best to you,

Brandon Brown, and the Nonsite Collective

Please join Brandon Brown, Judith Goldman, David Brazil, and the Nonsite Collective for a panel discussion and workshop on the politics and ethics of translation on Wednesday. August 22nd.

The panel promises to be a very exciting one, in which participants will give informal mini-talks on their translation practices, dilating their thoughts about key issues in translation through problems/questions they have addressed in translating specific texts. Presenters so far include David Larsen, Brandon Brown, Susan Gevirtz, Eleni Stecopoulos, and Earl Jackson (via Rob Halpern), while Chris Daniels and Andrew Joron will be discussants. Collective discussion is encouraged throughout.

The panel will take place at the home of David Brazil and Judith
Goldman, at 7:30 pm at 5338 College Avenue, Apt. D. This venue is about three blocks south of the Rockridge BART station (a five minute or so walk from that station), on the east side of the street. Our home phone number is 510-594-9538.

This discussion will initiate a curriculum sponsored by the Nonsite Collective engaged with the question of translation as social and aesthetic practice. The next event related to this curriculum will be a 10-player performance of Brandon Brown's translation of Aeschylus' "The Persians," which will take place at 2pm on Sunday, August 26th. (A formal invitation to the play with further details will follow soon.)

Please be sure to RSVP to Judith Goldman at goldman.judith AT gmail dot com
by Friday, August 17th if you plan to attend the translation panel so that we can get a headcount. Read more

The Italian adage that calls the translator a traitor expresses a long-standing and still effervescent understanding of the role of the translator in the process known as “translation.” The translator—what are her qualities? She operates between the poles of fidelity and treason. She is valued to the very extent that she maintains her invisibility. She operates between the poles of domesticity and foreignness. She is full of secrets. She is not to be trusted.

In my work I have been interested in the sentence passed on translation, the sentence passed on the translator in advance. I am interested in the specificity of the metaphors that translators live by. These metaphors, far from serving as remote descriptors of an alien process, have affected my process as a translator in an intimate way—I have embraced them as it were in a thorny embrace, without the melodrama.

In 2004, I translated several odes of the Roman poet Horace. In the process of making those translations, I experienced profound discomfort in reading his works. I was not able to read these works, written in praise of Caesar Augustus (a dictator whose father had just recently been dictator) and praising his recent decisions to wage war, as if there were no time and space, only mirror images of meanings. My eyes, if they were focused on the text of Horace, were always part of the body which was inundated by representations of the unimaginable violence taking place in my name around the world, to some extent engineered by a sort of dictator (whose father had just recently been dictator).

Benjamin Hollander describes a translation as “some of what the translator read.” I wished to make that profound bodily discomfort I experienced in reading the works legible in the translations. Read more

For info on Aeschylus’ play, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persians

For info on a “literal translation,” please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_translation

For a (standard) translation by Robert Potter of Aeschylus’ “The Persians,” please see:
http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/persians.html

For info on the Presidio and its history, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidio_of_San_Francisco
www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/san-francisco-presidio.htm

For info on Executive Order 9066 (authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, signed at the Presidio):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066

If you would like to share information you have found about the Presidio’s past/present/future, or to share any other potential resources related to this performance, please send a link or document to:
info@nonsitecollective.org

from Albucius, by Pascal Quignard

translated by Bruce Boone

"Reader"

When the present offers little joy and the inevitable months ahead bring only the prospect of repetition, monotony can be avoided by raiding the past. The thighs of the dead open, their stomachs (sweet with the passage of twenty-one hundred years) join and heal again. Secrets, certain puzzles better left not spoken, are dug up, and from little wooden beams, and from bird’s down, a nest is fashioned for some older patrician woman, a nest of the ancient Hebrew type. It’s a protection.

Things that once were true provide greater protection for falsity, and for the wishes stirred up by falsity, than some simple anachronistic plot or other, pieced together, scavenged from god-knows-where. Caius Albucius Silus existed. So did his declamations. I invented the nest I plunked Albucius into, Albucius with whatever warmth he has, his little life, his rheumatism, the few greens I threw in for the salad, and his melancholy. His ghost may thereby be gratified with a few colors, pleasures, perhaps a death even—who knows? I love this world and the stories whose invention is made possible by their absence.

In June 1989, I was alone and I was tired. I had jotted down 60 of these pages while seated on a wooden bench. Huge solemn crows flew across the ramparts of the imperial gardens in Tokyo.
Read more

Translation as Social & Aesthetic Practice

Curriculum Description :

In a world of hardening borders and contested spaces, translation means more than just the unimpeded movement from one language or another. This Nonsite Curriculum presses at the limits of what “translation” is and can do. As artists, writers, activists and citizens, we are translating all the time: between media, archives, audiences, and communities. Smooth transmission tends to be frustrated, however, often making social antagonisms legible. How do our various projects negotiate this frustration and this legibility, while activating material in the spaces between languages and cultures: not only texts, images and artifacts, but also borders, histories, documents, and even policy? And how does the translator-citizen inhabit those spaces, readying our attention, as migrating social imaginaries lead the way toward new forms of thought and action?

“Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” addresses these questions and the stakes they raise through presentations, plays, readings, talks and discussions.

The curriculum is open to everyone at all levels of involvement, including the planning of future events.

Event:

Join us Thursday evening, February 28, for a trio of presentations by:

Bruce Boone: Reading and discussing his translations of Pascal Quignard.

Susan Greene: Presenting and discussing her public art projects in Occupied Palestine.

Chris Nagler: Reading and discussing his translations of Alberto Masferrer.

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street
Thursday, Feb. 28
6-8 pm
415-512-2020
sfcamerawork.org

In the weeks immediately following this event, there will be a series of informal discussions by all three of the participants.

Bruce Boone: Thursday, March 6.
Chris Nagler: Monday, March 10.
Susan Greene: Tuesday, April 1.

For information regarding times and locations, contact rob.halpern@gmail.com. Read more

Join us Thursday evening, February 28, for a trio of presentations by:

Bruce Boone: Reading and discussing his translations of Pascal Quignard.

Susan Greene: Presenting and discussing her public art projects in Occupied Palestine.

Chris Nagler: Reading and discussing his translations of Alberto Masferrer.

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street
Thursday, Feb. 28
6-8 pm
415-512-2020
sfcamerawork.org

Please join Bruce Boone on Thursday, March 6th, for a more intimate follow-up discussion on translation and the work of Pascal Quignard.

This event is linked to the group translation event at SF Camerawork on February 28th. Texts relevant to the discussion can be found here.

For details including time and place, please sign up using the tab above, and the event organizer will contact you.

Please join Chris Nagler on Monday, March 10th, for a more intimate follow-up discussion on translation and the work of Alberto Masferrer.

This event is linked to the group translation event at SF Camerawork on February 28th.

For details including time and place, please sign up using the tab above and the event organizer will contact you.

"Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" continues on Tuesday evening, April 1 with Susan Greene, who will present and discuss several of her public art projects in Palestine, while addressing the questions: What are some of the dynamics between translation and solidarity? And, when and how can public art activate social spaces?

at Get Lost Travel Books
1825 Market Street
(betwn. Valencia and Guerrero)
7 pm

Susan Greene is an artist, educator and clinical psychologist. Her
practice straddles a range of cultural arenas, new media, and public art, while focusing on borders, migrations, decolonization and memory. Greene is one of four Jewish American women artists who formed Break the Silence Mural Project in 1989. Break the Silence artists have returned to Occupied Palestine numerous times to facilitate community mural projects, conduct arts workshops, and create sculpture in refugee camps in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Beit Hanoun and Rafah. They have presented their work to high school, university, and community audiences across the United States including at the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Alternative Museum in New York. The group has also produced an award winning video. Greene has led or participated in more than 30 public art projects worldwide. Originally from NYC, she has been a resident of the Bay Area 25 years. She teaches and directs the Learning Center at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Curriculum Description:

In a world of hardening borders and contested spaces, translation means more than just the unimpeded movement from one language or another. This Nonsite Curriculum presses at the limits of what “translation” is and can do. As artists, writers, activists and citizens, we are translating all the time: between media, archives, audiences, and communities. Smooth transmission tends to be frustrated, however, often making social antagonisms legible. How do our various projects negotiate this frustration and this legibility, while activating material in the spaces between languages and cultures: not only texts, images and artifacts, but also borders, histories, documents, and even policy? And how does the translator-citizen inhabit those spaces, readying our attention, as migrating social imaginaries lead the way toward new forms of thought and action?

“Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” addresses these questions and the stakes they raise through presentations, plays, readings, talks and discussions.

The curriculum is open to everyone at all levels of involvement, including the planning of future events.

Excellent project/resources:

http://eipcp.net/transversal

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0606

El Dinero Maldito – Cursed Currency by Alberto Masferrer, trans. Christian Nagler (and cf. the translator's companion piece, Panamerica circa 1930.

Chapter 1 The Street of the Dead

This street where I live, you could call it street of bitterness, or, better yet, Street of the Dead. For six blocks, west, to the hospital, a caravan of sufferers, poor ones, the wretched – they pass by at all hours to see if they can scrounge some relief. Five blocks in the other direction, there are three state-run bars, where one drinks day and night; where the pianola, the phonograph, the cries of men and the clash of glasses and bottles deafen the hearing of passersby . . . and also their consciences, since it seems all but impossible for them, for you, to fathom the dramas that are born within.
In front of my house, one block away, is the penitentiary, where the helpless criminals live; those of them that don’t happen to have the golden key that opens the doors of justice.
Sundays, since early in the morning, and all day long, life is bound in a fateful trinity of violence, pain, and ruin. Since seven in the morning, they begin passing through, coming from the volcano, young and old campesinos. They come to enjoy themselves. They have worked all week, bent over the ground, planting, pruning, plowing, weeding, so that the corn, the rice, the beans, and the plantain cover our tables; so that the prettiest flowers rest in our vases; so that the milk and the eggs comfort and nourish us; so that life in all forms descends from on high, to revive the fading powers of those of us who suffer and sin in the city. Read more

Selections of Bruce Boone's Quignard translations and the French originals are attached.

"Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" continues on Tuesday evening, April 1 with Susan Greene, who will present and discuss several of her public art projects in Palestine, while addressing the questions: What are some of the dynamics between translation and solidarity? And, when and how can public art activate social spaces?

at Get Lost Travel Books
1825 Market Street
(betwn. Valencia and Guerrero)
7 pm

Susan Greene is an artist, educator and clinical psychologist. Her
practice straddles a range of cultural arenas, new media, and public art, while focusing on borders, migrations, decolonization and memory. Greene is one of four Jewish American women artists who formed Break the Silence Mural Project in 1989. Break the Silence artists have returned to Occupied Palestine numerous times to facilitate community mural projects, conduct arts workshops, and create sculpture in refugee camps in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Beit Hanoun and Rafah. They have presented their work to high school, university, and community audiences across the United States including at the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Alternative Museum in New York. The group has also produced an award winning video. Greene has led or participated in more than 30 public art projects worldwide. Originally from NYC, she has been a resident of the Bay Area 25 years. She teaches and directs the Learning Center at the San Francisco Art Institute.

This event promises to extend some recent discussions:

PALESTINE: Interior / Exterior
Videos by James T. Hong and Kamal Aljafari (artists in person)
co-presented by kino21 and the Arab Film Festival

Wednesday, April 9, 2008. 8PM $8

Artists' Television Access

http://www.atasite.org/calendar/?x=2841

Artifact Reading Series
in collaboration with Nonsite Collective
hosts an evening of improvization, performance, and reading

by

Michael Basinksi, David Larsen, and Jeanne Heuving
Saturday, May 24th
6PM doors/6:30PM reading starts

at

The Oakland Art Gallery at Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland CA 94612

Watch for related Nonsite events and curricular materials to be announced on this website soon!

“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…”

.

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

“Translation as a Spiritual Practice”
A Report on Bruce Boone’s Recent Talk

On Thursday, March 7 2008 Bruce Boone gave a talk and facilitated a discussion as part of Nonsite’s “Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” curriculum. This was a follow-up to his presentation at SF Camerawork on 2/28, where Bruce presented together with Chris Nagler and Susan Greene.

Bruce’s talk was remarkable for its range and its depth, and the report that follows here is my attempt to get at a few of its key propositions/provocations.

In attendance: Tanya Hollis, Robert Glück, David Larsen, Eirik Steinhoff, Chris Nagler, Rob Halpern and Jocelyn Saidenberg.

Bruce began with a rather startling proposition: more than just social and aesthetic, translation is a “spiritual” practice. He went on to note that some translations are spiritual while others are not, and that this amounts to a hierarchy that exceeds the valuation of “good” and “bad.” Moreover, those translations that incline toward “the spiritual” exact a physical toll on the body of the translator. This isn’t meant to be taken metaphorically. Like Jalal Toufic, who uses what often seem to be extravagant metaphors quite literally, Bruce proposes that this toll is indeed corporeal.

For Bruce, “non-spiritual” translations — say, the commercial — presuppose the false value of transparent, unimpeded transmission. By contrast, a “spiritual” translation would conceal and reveal an encounter with the pre-prosodic asociality of language. In the process of rendering the asocial as social, the translator comes into contact with the non-differentiation of meaning and meaninglessness — a kind of death — something the work of translation must go on to affirm paradoxically as a life source. Read more

<<Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice>> continues with Tyrone Williams and Pat Clifford (both visiting from Cincinnati) speaking on:

"The Dynamics of History and Culture: 'Pale Approximations'... Who Can/May Speak?"

Sunday, June 1
Dinner 6:30
Talks 7:30
at Rob and Lee's home (in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood)
email for address and directions:
rob[dot]halpern AT gmail[dot]com

Pat Clifford examines the relationship between the Bengali poet Buddhadeva Bose and George Oppen, focusing in particular on Oppen’s arrangements of several of Bose’s poems, while Tyrone Williams discusses history as translation in the work of Somali novelist Nurridin Farah.

Granted, through Rob's report, not having been present at the talk--I can only glimpse BB's astonishing and (for me) kindred translation practice. Strikes me first as: the nearest any description has ever come to my 'ordinary' experience of words--whether speech, thought, the tacit. The source text (the arising, unauthored or other-authored) involved with each word. (The scant control I lend to what I say and write is not terribly significant. With my body, my being, my ego, the constant attuning and not impeding...whether buying oranges and apples at supermarket, or writing a poem). The originating from nowhere--placing the secluded in the middle of the social--each time I open my mouth. The shared untraceability of words as we fluidly use them is dizzying, harrowing, inconceivably sublime.

Adding these notes, taken while reading Rob's report:

You'd have to imagine the condition in which there is only One Subjectivity (ours) to sort of know what I mean.

In the subtle body only 1/4 of the word is speakable. This is the same as saying that, for me, there is no such thing as pre-prosodic.

(I've got the secret 'down' to the even the sound between and created at overlap of phonemes.)

In Kashmir the de-differentiated word is called 'sphuratta'--sometimes translated as 'luminous throbbing' (but, one can only find out for oneself--in BB's situation between differentiation and non--the death that is not death--the only state that can actually make the metabolic non-necrotic.)

Differentiation is terminal. True for sound, true for cells, true as us.

I like the idea of democracy being secret and not public knowledge (shared secret knowledge? Constantly renewable as an initial rising and realization in each one of us.) Of course a commercial democracy must be utterly extrovert (why we freak out, currently, when our leaders withhold information from us). Read more

[the following is the text of a talk given by Tyrone Williams for Nonsite's "Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" curriculum, Sunday, June 1, 2008. See related posts.]

Nurrudin Farah has explored the sedimentation of history as precisely the topsoil from which cultures flower and to which they return. In at least two trilogies—Secrets, Gifts and Maps as one; Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines and Close Sesame as the other—Farah has created a Somali of the imagination that, while Dickensian in its encyclopedic scope, remains very much the Somali of the 20th century. As a “country” occupied by pre-and post-Islamic Arab nomads, Italy and England, the country is a perfect Petri dish in which to observe struggles over the question of “authentic’ or “indigenous’ tribal customs, mores and values. In his first trilogy Farah triangulates Somali, Ethiopian and Italian cultures and languages in order to calibrate the relative values of custom v. freedom, tribal pride v. state loyalty, and so on. In the second trilogy he follows several families as they attempt to unseat a dictator who, while implanting a socialist state apparatus, relies on and uses his powerful tribal loyalties to squelch dissent. Read more

The text of Tyrone Williams's talk, "The Dynamics of History and Culture: 'Pale Approximations'... Who Can/May Speak?," given as part of the collective's "Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" curriculum this past Sunday nite, is now accessible as a document on this site. See:

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/WilliamsDynamics

The Nonsite Collective's "Translation As Social and Aesthetic Practice" curriculum continues at SF Camerawork with:

Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

Thurs, July 10 at 6 pm
SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
415.512.2020 ext: 105

Amy Trachtenberg
Found in Translation on Paros

“In considering a place we look at passages of time, development and decay. As an outsider to any locale, we find ourselves in states of translation: both the navigator and the one in need of guiding. The physical and cultural realms are layered by an accrual of rites and texture to be misconstrued by the interloper. Without mutual consent, but as a means of interpretation, I use the camera like a tongue in search of speech. The projected slides in rhythmic sequences are a case study in questioning.”

Elliot Anderson
Weeding-In: Site Translation As Environmental Practice Read more

http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/hofer/webspecial.htm

http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/5/articles/hofer/hofer.htm

We are all familiar with George Oppen. However, some may only know Buddhadev Bose for his poems “arranged” and included in Oppen's The Materials. Few in the states realize how prominent and prolific Bose was, not only as a poet, but as an essayist, playwright and critic. He was the founding editor of the first Bengali-language poetry journal called Kavita, or Poetry. He was even regarded as the literary successor to Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

He was a founding member of what is called the post-Tagore modernist (or adhunik) generation—a Bengali modernism which reflected a shift away from Tagore’s Idealism toward more urban and secular themes. They were cosmopolitan and heavily influenced by Western literature, Bose particularly with Pasternak, and later Baudelaire and Holderlin. He also admired Pound, publishing his Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot and The Great Digest through his Kavitabhavan press in 1949.

Politics was an inescapable reality for their generation. Bose was a member of several left-leaning groups, including the Communist-led Progressive Writer’s Union, in the 30’s and 40’s, but later felt that “what had been conceptually liberal turned into various hardened ideologies.” (Dyson, xxxiii). Frustrated by a lapse into what he felt was “political cacophony.” (AGG, 25) he had a growing sense of disillusionment, then frustration, with Bengali political poetry starting in the late 1940’s. He then made a break with the Indian Left that garnered him the label of “reactionary”, even “CIA Agent”, from some. The animosity only intensified as the Communist Party rose to power in West Bengal. On the one hand still seen as hard-working and sincere, he also had the reputation for being uncompromising and too stubbornly stuck in his ways. Read more

Pat Clifford has posted his recent "Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" talk on this site:

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/437

The Nonsite Collective's "Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" curriculum will continue at SF Camerawork with presentations by two visual artists working in a range of media:

Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

Thurs, July 10 at 6 pm
SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
415.512.2020 ext: 105

Amy Trachtenberg
Found in Translation on Paros

“In considering a place we look at passages of time, development and decay. As an outsider to any locale, we find ourselves in states of translation: both the navigator and the one in need of guiding. The physical and cultural realms are layered by an accrual of rites and texture to be misconstrued by the interloper. Without mutual consent, but as a means of interpretation, I use the camera like a tongue in search of speech. The projected slides in rhythmic sequences are a case study in questioning.”

Elliot Anderson
Weeding-In: Site Translation As Environmental Practice Read more

If you're in the Bay Area, come out for a discussion following-up on questions posed by Amy Trachtenberg's and Elliot Anderson's recent presentations at SF Camerawork [see: http://nonsitecollective.org/node/435]

Sunday, August 3
3 pm
at the home of Elliot Anderson
for location, please contact Elliot at:
ewanders[AT]ucsc[dot]edu

Amy Trachtenberg asks: "How do we as writers and visual artists find modalities of translation when experiencing place from the position of 'the other' or interloper?"

No need to have been present at that event to participate in this.

Elliot and Amy have forwarded the attached texts for reference. These include the texts of both Amy's and Elliot's talks, and excerpts on the work of Robert Irwin.

Attached is a pdf of the recent Wire cover story on Ultra-red.

Dont Rhine of Ultra-red will facilitate a discussion Monday at 7 pm in SF. See under events.