Report on Bruce Boone's Recent Talk

“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.

For Bruce, the translator’s own body becomes an index of translation’s consequence. As both a conduit and an obstruction for transmission, the body facilitates the otherwise impossible passage from source text to target text, and in doing so, the translator pays a somatic price. Simply by getting in the way, the body — the ears, the bowels, the skin, the voice — makes itself vulnerable to a process that is at once linguistic and metabolic, a process where boundaries are simultaneously abolished and reinscribed. In Bruce’s vocabulary, this is a spiritual scene insofar as it situates one between differentiation and non-differentiation, between life and death, while bringing one close to a primal opacity: language without discourse.

This opacity marks translation’s horizon, where source text and target text converge, where the common sense distinctions between the two dissolve, and where the translator risks a kind of dissolution as well. At the same time as source and target texts converge, they also become absolutely alien, making any bridge impossible, including the bridge that is the translator’s body. This contradiction may help explain what Bruce referred to as “the secret:” the simultaneous dissolution and hardening of boundaries — at once linguistic, somatic, and social — a paradoxical tension which must be at once preserved and veiled by the translator.

But the secret may also be that there is no secret insofar as it does away with all forms of mystification. Or, as Robert Kocik writes in Rhurbarb, “The disclosed version of this text is available only metabolically,” that is, concretely, corporeally, somatically. (I’ve just finished reading Kocik’s book, and his notion of the prosodic body resonates with Bruce’s idea of spiritual translation.) “The secret” might be thought of in terms of what Kocik refers to as the “code that breaks the unbreakable code.” Prosody and translation veil and affirm the opacity of an unspeakable non-differentiation, where even the most fundamental distinction between life and death — let alone distinctions between languages and cultures — breaks down.

For Bruce, it would appear that the translator enters this state like a kind of “death before dying,” where all boundaries—between words, languages, bodies — dissolve, leaving the translator beside the untranslatable, an encounter with pure non-sense, where the body risks its own unintelligibility. But this poiesis exacts a price. Hence, after an encounter with the oracle — one of Bruce’s examples — the priest struggles desperately to return to articulated speech, and to veil the state of dissolution, but can only do this by way of the most exigent of artifices, a kind of babble or speaking in tongues whereby one moves toward new sense only by way of utter nonsense (recalling Artaud’s non-discursive and alogical prosody?).

From still another angle, translation may be an amplification of — if not an allegory for — referential language itself, recalling how “at the very site of reference lies death” (Michel Serres). Translation thus becomes a death-defying strategy: to refer without referring. Again, I think of Toufic’s meditation in Vampires on the “Here lies” of both epitaph and reference. The pun might be helpful: translation as the scene where the boundaries between life and death, reference and non-reference, truth and falsehood breakdown. And I’m struck once more by the resonance with Toufic: “To create reference and location is at the price of being lost in the realm of the dead, a realm that undoes any map, any topography.”

“The secret” remains the indigestible kernel of Bruce’s presentation. What he refers to as “the spiritual” with respect to translation may return quite readily to the social and aesthetic but only after reckoning the stakes of its practice: democracy (the twin illusions of transparency and equal access, together with the leveling of cultural values that ensues), and prosody (the structures of sound and orthographic patterning that render the distinctions necessary for meaning-making). While Bruce thematized democracy explicitly (more on that below), he only alludes implicitly to prosody, something I’m inclined to think about through Kocik’s work. “Show that prosody is the nonautomatic nervous system” (Rhurbarb). What would it mean to translate as if every phoneme, every articulation of two breaths, were to achieve a somatic value, either supplementing or diminishing or reconfiguring the corpus? (Writing this now, I’m also thinking of Susan Greene’s project, and of laying one’s body on the line in a human chain across the girth of occupied Palestine. Can we think these projects together?)

Toward the end of his discussion, Bruce suggested that “spiritual” translation — translation that enters into a form of communion with the “secret” of language’s opaque transparency — undermines the appearance of democratic values: equality, and exchangeability. The secret is anything but common knowledge — indeed, common sense rejects it. What’s more, the source is blocked, and access exacts a great price. Translation affirms distinction and limited access, while at the same time demystifying the work of making meaning by locating the body’s place in that.

The discussion that followed was rich and it included Tanya’s interest in Susan Howe, and the status of “translations” that emerge from a privileged access to an archive; Bob’s reflections on the melancholic experience of loss that occurs in the process of translation when one overidentifies with the source; Chris Nagler’s interest is preserving a distinction between the discursive and somatic registers of that loss; and Eirik’s interest in pursuing the relationship between translation and democracy, which has a long history, he noted, beginning with the protestant revolution, and the social exigency of translating the bible into the vernacular under the sign of equal access and the leveling of hierarchy.