I write to you: Poetics of the Letter in Translation
Why I read the way that I do somehow translates into why I write the way that I do. The list of texts that I have selected are important moments in reading for me because they attempt to inscribe this question of reading as writing into the act of writing itself. Partly what connects the texts is a reconfigured intentionality, both in the sense of a ‘faulty copying’ and in a play with a reader’s expectations through a restaging of translated or borrowed language. Recognising the necessary limits of selective sampling, these texts are linked generationally, by way of participation in feminist thought and social practices, and in their engagment with “innovative” language practices.
Helene Cixous’s “Foreword” to Clarice Lispector’s novel The Stream of Life (Agua Viva) is a recent discovery of mine that exemplifies this idea of reconfigured intentionality. Her text’s purpose is to introduce Lispector’s novel, however, in this case, it also becomes a primary reading source as it excedes its own definition. In a sense, the “Foreword” is a way of translating Lispector’s text through a rereading of it. Cixous’s piece is a text about a text that becomes simultaneously inextricable and yet notably independent from it.
I am compelled by notions of non-fiction, fiction, the interview, the preface, foreword, etc., and how these kinds of texts work formally on their own as well as in relation to. I am interested in those texts whose place is to come before, after or somehow mark the position of the central text in question– and how this interest relates to theoretic and poetic ideas about translation. Writing practices that seek to reread other texts through formal innovation rather than a strict interpretation of disciplinary function. Translation understood as a curatorial exercise that is centered within questions of reading and writing and how these two acts inseparably inform each other; translation from one language to another but also from one text to another.
The role of ethics and of love in translation, as dealt with by Spivak in her essay, “The Politics of Translation,” rearticulates the intimacy of the act of translation as not only the need to create meaning or communicate with another. She understands the site of exchange of language and translation as an erotic act and she interestingly intertwines the definitions of the ethical with the erotic: “We have to turn the other into something like the self in order to be ethical. To surrender in translation is more erotic than ethical” (183). She develops her critique of language by dealing with what is lost when the original language is understood apart from its cultural context. Spivak’s ideas of love and ethics play into notions of surrender and erotics in a postcolonial framework, “as one produces expository prose is to work at someone else’s title, as one works with a language that belongs to many others. This, after all, is one of the seductions of translating. It is simple miming of the responsibility to the trace of the other in the self” (179).
Many of the writers I have chosen work with poetic and theoretic language in the form of “innovative writing” or “experimental poetry,” two very nebulous and often times over generalised definitions for writing practices that are neither conventionally here nor there– neither poetry, prose or theory. Writers like Kathleen Fraser, Norma Cole, Anne-marie Albiach, Lyn Heijinan and Rosemarie Waldrop share common generations while also similar intellectual traditions coming out of ‘68 in one form or another. Except for Albiach who lives in France, they currently live in the United States and work as professors/poets/translators in the University system while running small-presses, journals and readings. Interestingly, they all work in multiple languages, working to translate the work of others while developing their own.
Best known for her films, Yvonne Rainer works extensively with text in her visual projects and is fairly prolific as a writer. Initially trained as a dancer working with Merce Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, her work extends across a great deal of contemporary theory, artistic practices and social movements. I have included an interview between Rainer and the original Camera Obscura collective from 1976 in which as she says herself, “I had found somehow myself playing devil’s advocate throughout, dragging my feet through their certainties and hell-for-leather faith in Brechtian correlations between form and social good” (141). Her work challenges ideas of representation dealing with articulations of identity and the political viability/necessity of making art. I really believe Yvonne Rainer to be of tremendous importance in her ability to work contentiously through many disciplines, translating informatively from one to the other while questioning the artist’s relevance to political change within the work itself.
Also in interview form is the piece “Devouring Myth” between Kathy Acker and Sylvere Lotringer (Editor of Semiotext(e)) that precedes her book Hannibal Lecter, My Father. Having been influenced by conceptual artists in the 1960s, Acker began translating visual techniques into her writing. She reworks the intentionality of major texts, such as Great Expectations, into hypersexual and playfully offensive pieces dealing with how politics and language come together, as Acker says, “what the image is.” Acker works in many frayed writing styles confusing autobiographical conceits and the original intentionality of her borrowed texts. She says, “[y]ou create identity, you’re not given identity per se. What became more interesting to me wasn’t the I, it was text because it’s texts that create the identity. That’s how I got interested in plagiarism” (7).
Chris Kraus is editor of the “Native Agent” series within the Semiotext(e) editions that are run by Lotringer (also her husband) and someone I believe is overlooked as a writer and theorist. Her writing is too uncomfortable and too revealing to be thought of as correct and serious intellectual theory. In I Love Dick, she places herself as both character and author and fictionalises all of it in the process. The girl as sex object and as hysteric artist, on display and overplayed, Kraus reworks theoretical problematics through performing theory as narrative fiction. Displaying author as character and reducing character to the limits of autobiographical conceit, Kraus confounds and plays with the binary division of private/public through an epistolary novel full of letters to “Dick.”
Kraus and her husband Sylvere are the characters in this piece performing thoughts about their love for one another and for someone else through the connection between love and writing. Her “Every Letter is a Love Letter” piece I find to strike an interesting place with Anne Carson’s book Eros: The Bittersweet from which I have included “Letters, Letters.” Carson is a Greek scholar who writes contemporary fiction and in this book she traces the connection between desire and writing in Greek Literature. Her idea about “triangulation” is that the desire between two people takes a third point, in this case, writing. Desire and writing are thus intertwined with each other and the necessary (un)fulfillment of desire often expresses itself through acts of writing to another .
Genet’s work, The Prisoner of Love, is his last work and is rarely acknowledged. Genet’s later years were spent travelling through Palestine, writing about what was happening there in the 1970s and 1980s as he was sought out by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation to do so. Part poetic memoir, historiography and political fiction, this work describes the difficulty/impossibility of translation while at the same time affirming and complicating the attempt of writing about something as partly an attempt/conflation of writing about oneself. The erotics of translation and the position of not only outsider but placeless outsider. Genet beautifully describes the eroticism and deformativity of power relations creating metaphors of transsexualism to describe the historic events of the time. His observations are not without their own discomfort however, this older French man traipsing about Palestine noting the beauty and eroticism of the young revolutionaries, and yet, it is exactly in this space that Genet is challenging and disassembling the assumed knowing and recognition that language gives identity and meaning. Weaving a trail between the problematic and the astute, Genet struggles with his capacity of translating memory and locating it’s many truths.
Through the creation of this bibliography, a curatorial and translation act in itself, I have explored the somewhat automatic and initial choices of my own reading habits. The placement “next to” or “in association with” as creating a forum for expansion and collision of ideas that is really endless and actually quite fun. There is also a certain vantage point of looking back that I couldn’t seem to avoid here–compiling and reconfiguring personally important texts in my growth as a reader. Their resituation is revealing on some levels of my own cultural moment . Somehow, an engaging politicality is something I can locate through a rereading of other people’s work. A stretch in time and in memory and an incessant need to assemble together , to list, in order to create. As an Italo Calvino character reflects, “today I will begin by copying the first sentences of a famous novel…”(177). In an authentic beginning, lies the recognition of locating oneself in an over-cliched, over-saturated formality. To begin. And within this recognition, the play between overlapping intentions and conflicting interpretations also begins. A constant translation of address to you from I.
Wendy Tronrud
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Works presented on the exhibition:
Index
Index of a book I haven’t yet written and most probably never will. The index is half way biographical and half way theory text; it is extremely personal, yet full of clichés. Meaning results as a consequence of quotes, interaction of sources and contextualisation of influences. A container that becomes its own content.
A-Z in 4 double page spread, laser-prints, 30 x 40 inches ea., 2003
Fade Out
A single slide of a young woman is projected continuously until the image fades out. (A physical
effect produced by the light and heat emanating from the projector.) An exercise in forgetting. The duration of the “performance”, as with the persistence of our memories, is undetermined.
single slide projection, 2002
This is a soundtrack. You are a movie.
Silver text on wall. Cd player / ambient sound.
Flowers
Art as an attempt at making someone happy. As a way to make someone like us better. A way of continuing or establishing a conversation. A bouquet of flowers was sent to a selected group of
people. An act/performance for a public of one; micro-relational politics. A card with the following text accompanied the flowers: THIS SCULPTURE BY ALEJANDRO CESARCO IS SPONSERED BY
SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK
framed c-print, 24 x 24 inches, 2003
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Alejandro Cesarco’s text-specific work explores ideas of the book, layers of reference to personal and artistic influences, notions of the romantic, the construction of narrative, and the experience of time. The strategic emphasis in producing the work is not placed primarily on the transmission of information, but rather on how meaning is felt.
Since 1998 Cesarco has exhibited, at among other places, Leslie Tonkonow Artworks+Projects (NYC), El Museo del Barrio (NYC), Socrates Sculpture Park, (Long Island City, NY), Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (Montevideo, Uruguay), Colección Engelman-Ost, (Montevideo, Uruguay), and The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY).
Has also curated several exhibitions in Montevideo, Uruguay and in New York City; including “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo and “Chapter V”, a group show including Liam Gillick, Vija Celmins, and Douglas Gordon at Art Resources Transfer in NYC. Throughout 2004 he has co-organized “Visitas”, a project at the Centro Cultural Rojas in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that constructs a public bibliographical archive according to selections made by invited participants such as Carol Bove and Julie Ault.
Lives in New York since 1998.
