This is only a short writing section of Subjects in Translations, a project I have been working with both visually and academically for the past two years.
I would like to bring forward temporality, and specifically temporality in a subject in translation. In chapter 3, Subjects in Translation, I briefly mentioned the big gaps of time that translation has to overcome. For instance, it is very difficult to translate a text like Don Quixote, written in 17th century Spanish and translate it to the 21st century in that “same” language. It is sometimes even more troublesome to translate a text with such a time difference into another language. First of all, it is a transformation in the reader, a transformation that must somehow bridge time divide. Second of all, it asks the question: how to reconcile the unrenconcilable? Meaning, how do you reconcile all of the cultural differences that arise from different languages, and still add into the mix a few hundred years of distance? How would one stay faithful to something that, in all its meanings and diversions, has no exact translation to how you relate to the world today? When scholars say that translation is trying to achieve “an impossible” that nonetheless has to be done, they mean that one cannot stay fully faithful to the original meaning and also that one cannot stop time. A subject can relate to the past, find that which is still meaningful to the life he has lived and lives today; but one cannot reenact something without there being a difference to at least a certain degree.
Sophie Calle, the French artist and writer, did a piece in 2007 called Take Care of Yourself. This artwork consisted in the gathering of 107 women’s interpretation of a break-up letter she received by e-mail by her boyfriend. Every one of the 107 women was asked to interpret the letter depending on what their field of profession was. For instance, a judge (unknown name) interprets the letter as a contract, as a voluntary agreement by both parties. She says, “Taken as a whole, this letter clearly illustrates the fact that the conduct of an amorous relationship is not so different from the negotiation and performance of a banal lease.” Another interpretation is that of Arlette Farge, a historian and specialist in the eighteenth century, who responds to the breakup letter by transferring the “boyfriend” (author of the letter) to a person that she could analyze as belonging to the eighteenth century. Of the other 105 interpretations that make up the analysis of the piece, the only one that is missing is the one of the recipient/artist herself. If we interpret this is a psychoanalytic framework, we could potentially say that the artist is trying to avoid to give one meaning to an event (receiving the breakup letter); an interpretation that ultimately and potentially be considered as a defense mechanism because of the gesture towards intellectualization/analyzation (find a reasonable explanation) of a breakup. Instead, Sophie Calle decides to allow other woman to interpret the break-up letter through their professional field, relinquishing her own read.
However, other professions don’t produce an analysis with much veracity. For instance, Catherine Carone, a crossword writer, decides to transform this letter into a crossword. What I find interesting in producing a crossword out of a letter is that it is limited to specific words and also to a specific language, so the words are required to fit and match on the places assigned. Indeed, at the bottom of the solved puzzle in Sophie Calle’s book Take Care of Yourself we read a small warning saying, “This interpretation cannot be translated into English.” Most of the interpretations that originate out of the interpretation of the breakup letter seen above are interpretations that are generative. Not only in the sense that they made up something more out of the original thing; but also that they remain open for others to do the same thing with them. However, the puzzle functions in a different, more rigid, often closed level; it makes a translation impossible.
A crossword has specific rules. For instance, the form it contains is usually that of a square grid. The purpose is to fill the white squares with letters that form the meaning of a word of a previous clue given by the author. The clues that are given usually have some set rules as well. If one would give a clue of a PC key with only a three-letter option, the puzzle solver would actually end up with several possibilities (ALT, TAB, ESC etc.). In order to determine which one of this is the correct one, one would have to decipher another word from the crossword, where one of the words fills in one of the letters for this one, making the puzzle a form of contingency. Thus, unveiling the “correct” answer for this particular box composed of letters that form a word. Certainly there is a connection here between the Structuralist theory of the sign and the crossword puzzle.
According to Saussure, the relation between the signifier and the signified is ‘arbitrary’, meaning there is no connection between the form or phonetic component of a word and its concept. The most common example to the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified is that of the word cat. When one hears or reads the word C-A-T (the signifier), one realizes its has no connection with the visual image at the back of our heads (the signified). That is a four-legged creature, with whiskers that has a furry quality to it. The word cat, tells us nothing about the thing itself. It is empty of meaning, in the sense that it really says nothing about how the four-legged furry creature looks, sounds or behaves.
The impossibility of the translation in a crossword puzzle happens when you have a word that must signify the clue as a whole in relation to what each letter signifies. It is confusion between both semantics and semiotics. In semiotics, a sign has a meaning, which ultimately is something other than itself. However, the clue here becomes extremely important because it provides further signification. It opens up a possibility of multiple answers through a question. Regardless of finding the “correct” answer that needs to fit each white square with a letter to form a word that satisfies the clue in the crossword grid, the clue’s real purpose is to ask the question what might this be? However, the possibility of answering the clues is multiple, even if its placement or ultimate answer contains only one “correct” word to satisfy the initial question. If we understand the crossword in a metaphorical sense, the clue opens up a question while the literal placement of the grids to the answer are what limits this question towards only one answer. The grid is the framing we make for a multiplicity of answers, it is how we attempt to situate, delineate, and inbox the beauty and possibility of understanding ourselves as a multiplicity by instead reducing it to only one “correct” answer.
The task of the translator is very similar to the paradigm of the crossword. Why? Because the translator has the impossible duty to decide what word or word(s) might be the most adequate for the original and the language it is being translated to, as well as the specific time that one is translating for. It is considering at least two different cultures. Many times it is even more than two, not because there are more than two languages that are being considered, but rather because culture is dependent on its time and so is its language. Moreover, the translator follows the ‘original’ like the clue in the crossword, in the sense that he has to analyze it both word by word and in its entirety. The good translator is able to “make swift mental turns from one language into another”, without submitting to the originals grid. He creates his new crossword grid; one that though it has a similarity to the other (in this case the original), its form could not be more fitting to the time and place of the language he is translating into.
Crossword clues are consistent with the answer. For instance, if the clue is in the past tense, the answer will also be in the past tense. This is a big and important difference with how translation functions. Often, a translation does not have the luxury of operating consistently with the original. One of the impossibilities of making a translation is that it has to bridge time and meaning into another language; It is not consistent in its time or place with the ‘original’. Its inconsistency is what makes translation an impossibility both in regards to matching the original word by word, but also, and more importantly, by containing the possibility of transferring something that has been lost in time and making it relevant now, to the contemporary reader.
C.S. Peirce defined ‘the sign’ as “something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity.” In other words, that the sign is a relation between the form of the sign, the object and the interpreter. A word acquires new meaning by being identifiably different from other words in a language, even though such a configuration of words has actually no existing meaning. Let’s take as an example: Catherine Carone’s interpretation of Sophie Calle’s break up letter (Image 1), as a way of understanding why this form of interpretation is non-generative in a translation context.
The word A-M-O-U-R, which is located in line two, and starts on letter D of the grid. This word is connected by the letter of M (forming another word AMI), O (Forming the word NO), U (forming the word QUATRIEME) and R (forming the word URNE). If we tried to fit in the same space the word AMOUR (love in English), we would have one empty square, the word AMI (friend in English), would not even intertwine with any of the arbitrary signs of the word AMOUR. It would also require two more empty squares for the letters to be able to accommodate the word ‘friend’ in the English language. There is no possible way of transposing this exact form puzzle, designed specifically for the Francophone language to ever match the English language. There is no relationship between the order of letters forming a specific word on to the idea of what that word occupies the space of.
My question is what does this multiple interpretations in Calle’s piece have to do in relation to the breakup letter she received? Plato in his dialogues Timaeus writes, “We now learn that the copy is not self-subsistent; it needs the support of a medium, just as a reflection requires a mirror to hold it”(I am tempted to say nothing except the relationship a canvas might have to the painting). The paint, the color palette, the subject matter that a painting has, will vary in each canvas, it is not meant to mirror the canvas, it is meant to be generative. What Calle offers us is a medium for interpreting, it is a white canvas in which we, the interpreters are supposed to construct meaning out of something that is clearly inexplicable, and more so if we were to explain it only through one answer.
The truth is that sometimes in order to understand something you have to get some distance, you have to see it either from another perspective, or by ceasing to be, to an extent, although not fully in it. In a similar manner, Calle decides to take some distance from the breakup, to allow other women of all ages to interpret it, translate it. To transform it both visually and linguistically, and also to destroy it for her. In this manner, she allows for an opening of interpretations where the feminine experience broadens and allows her interpreters to occupy and perform a world of possibilities out of a letter that ultimately could have no meaning whatsoever. In this manner, Calle’s artwork becomes an invitation to construct meaning as well as becoming a performance of translation.
Performance art, particularly reenactment, stresses the struggle of epistemological and ontological problems. These problems are related to the possibility and impossibility of repetition. In this sense the categories of reenactment in performance and in literary translation investigate the way in which one might understand a thing of the past by its impossible repetition. Though the concern of both performance art and translation studies is similar, the way they approach it, is very different. A translator tends to focus on how a text might be transposed into another language, another time, and another culture. A performance reenactment on the other hand, questions our interpretation of history through the repetition of a particular event, person, or thing. It breaks up with the linear narrative of history, through the impossibility of attempting to repeat a particular event in time. It asks the questions like: How to represent the time of another generation? How may a reenactment function within our own temporal economy?
Sophie Calle’s piece(s) Take Care of Yourself, opens up a platform on which, through multiple interpretations, a formerly incommensurable event, may be turned into some kind of comprehensible information or generative gesture by the production of multiple interpretations, repetitions and permutations. Translation, on the other hand, finds in the multiplicity of idioms an impossibility of having a true translation. The search for a “true translation” is a requirement for the construct to be somehow legible, ordered and coherent. It is through this impossibility that translation is able to generate a space where through the deterritorialization of languages, we might be able to re-territorialize the language, outside of a territory. In other words, through fragments we may find a new way of understanding our own subjectivity through multiplicity.