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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.

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.