translation as social & aesthetic practice

Ultra-red in The Wire

Rob Halpern — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:31:12 -0400

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.

Follow-Up Discussion with Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

Rob Halpern — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:51:43 -0400

Start: 08/03/2008 - 10:19

Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

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.

Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

Rob Halpern — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:18:43 -0400

Start: 06/30/2008 - 04:00

Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

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

George Oppen, Buddhadev Bose and Translation

Rob Halpern — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:23:20 -0400

Start: 06/18/2008 - 06:21

Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

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

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

George Oppen, Buddhadev Bose and Translation

Pat Clifford — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:10:55 -0400

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.

Notes on Translation by Jen Hofer

David Buuck — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:05:41 -0400

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

NONSITE || Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson

Rob Halpern — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:21:04 -0400

Start: 07/10/2008 - 18:00

End: 07/10/2008 - 20:30

Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

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

Elliot Anderson
Weeding-In: Site Translation As Environmental Practice

Unpolished Response to Tyrone's Talk

laurenshufran — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:28:54 -0400

“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?).

"The Dynamics of History": the text of Tyrone Williams's talk

Rob Halpern — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:47:19 -0400

Start: 06/04/2008 - 07:40

Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

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 Dynamics of History and Culture: “Pale Approximations”... Who Can/May Speak? : text of a talk by Tyrone Williams

Rob Halpern — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:38:00 -0400

[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.