A story about translation [2] and a seminar…

This is not an essay, its selected notes which are the groundwork for the translation project. It’s a fiction. It’s a story, It’s a diary, It’s a trajectory, its a years work. It seems to have been somewhat forgotten today that literature does not consist of ideas, images, feelings, opinions, theses, objects of dispute, “objects of intellectual use”, etc., but of language, (Heissenbuttel). Lan<<>>guage.

I was told when beginning this project that translating one language into another is not a question of translating the words of one language into the words of another. It means re-telling in the words of one’s own language the realities related by the words of the foreign language. To translate well one has not only to know languages, but above all to know the reality in question. A year later I understand that this is not true. Language refuses such naivety.

7.30 AM wake up, look at social media and news on my iphone. Comment on a translation delusion. Read some notes on US politics. Expected speeches on the local economy. Facebook: Deleuze and Guattari notes. And “We need to to offset my reentry into the ultimate heteropatriarchal institution…” Order a book from my usual bookshop. She wakes up, has a dark blue teeshirt nightdress in dark blue with white stars, her arm across my chest. Good morning. she smiles at me because she is pleased to see me. Eventually listenning to the sounds of the house, music, someone moving around, water running, trying to listen to the words on the page. The occasional machine passing, a car, train, plane, helicopter. Am I missing something? Thinking about something, anything. Have to get up work needs us.

We are never happier that on those mornings when we are half asleep, half awake when lines of thought try and escape from our dreamwork.

8.15 AM — I leave the bedroom, moving, walk, shower, shave looking in the mirror, teeth, (I look at her in the bath, we talk about today, about how much she dislikes double negatives) and then still damp from the shower walk to the bedroom, my bare feet swish swish on the wooden floor, and put my watch on my left wrist. I think about looking at the ipad and review the text from yesterday Rucksprache in gebundener Rede, but decide instead to get dressed and go upstairs to begin the day. I’ll pay attention to the words on the page later. later. {time prehistory, dwindles to future between the russet October trees the lemon-yellow motor cars move.] The Lelit MaraX heats up. Led light blinking. Water added to the reservoir. The morning drugs taken with a bio-yogurt drink. 21 grams of freshly ground beans, Espresso in a stream from the MaraX, steamed microbubbles in milk, aspirin suspended in water, cereal. She is eating cornflakes, fruit tea, water. We speak of more physical friends who are walking in Spain, whilst we stand nomadically in one place. She has three or four patients, clients today, some online, some walking up the gravel path. Outside workmen are breaking up a stone patio with an electric hammer. Translation is a practice of language. There is no noise of media in the house.

Native language is not a set of grammer rules and regulations, it is the child’s spiritual nourishment (Korczak)

9 AM — There is a world which has passed, and its this one: “ An artist who cannot speak English is no artist” and “a Marxist who cannot speak English is no Marxist” Because in a world full of #machinetranslation and #socialmedia it is possible to read translations into your language immediately, mediated through a machine rather than a human translator, different institutions involving machines and humas. The human claiming knowledge and babel has passed. Haug says that the inability to read Marx’s writings in German generate misunderstandings and misinterpretations… Three versions of capital in english contradicts this. Machine translation liberates us from this thinking…As a continuation of translation through writing, however the hallmark of the technical media would not be reproduction , but rather translation, transposition, change. Wouldn’t the concept of re-functioning used by Benjamin and Brecht be applicable here? Refunctioning to what ?

10 AM — the silence of machines. The process of translation is a part of the technical media, film, photo, record, a=tape, internet, streaming. Here and now though the machines, technical media included are silent, quiet. I am collecting the things I have to take with me later. She is seeing her first patient of the day. The machine translates. The human edits and reads.

translation must be the language of the world. The world to come must be one of inter-languages: not of one dominant language, but of all languages. (Jullien)

11 AM — Later in the day, its late morning, if i listened intently I could hear the voices murmur in the other room. I am sitting at the table thinking of turning on the MaraX again and waiting for it to reheat or making tea. The sun is warm on. this late summer day. How noisy the constructions have been. The message arrives and confirms a medical appointment on October the 7th. I open the book, and read “variations on the opening of a novel” and then work the differences between this and the machine translation. The comparison is mine, the person, personal pronoun third person singular masculine feminine, a figure? the sliding indifference between pronouns. Someone to whom something is happening. Though since its structural the ideologies are collapsing. I sip tea and write some notes in my indecipherable hand writing. Not of a dominant language, whatever that may be, but of translation we wrote and lived trying to break pronouns.

Translation became the clay from which I would fashion my own interior language (Gansel)

11.30 AM Heissenbüttel’s “compositions” test me and my general condition. From Artaud to Wittgenstein to Benjamin to Adverts, Heissenbüttel picks apart quotes and produces collages (new.) What a strange and lovely Debordian plagiarism is in operation here, in multiple paragraphs, sentences, phrases I am drawn through reflections, which are arranged like new constructions, that are circular, new, whimsical, serious, dangerous. Connecting collages reproduced. The texts hold one in their warm arms… A 45-year-old Englishwoman from Birmingham seems young to you.

A cup of black tea, a slice of lemon and a slender spoonful of honey. Heissenbuttel does not mean renunciation, it means concentration, construction: I count the chapters, pages, and make general assumptions around around the 10 textbooks.textbooks. My mother died, so I am here; Friends have died, so I am here. From the sentences “not to finish what cannot be finished”. Like an order I take it with me.

Loathing the media despairing words say that bombs are falling on Gaza (again)), an Israeli sniper murders an infant with a bullet to its head. I gather the final papers and the USBs that I’ll need, together.

If translation is building a bridge between two foreign shores, I realiized that night how important it is for each of the ;piles to be firmly anchored. (Gansel)

1 PM (almost) I leave the house as she goes into the consulting room again. Her face has become her therapists face. I listen through the double doors to her greeting. The street is a gentle slope down into the valley, tarmac edged with drives, the other edge feathered onto the woodland border. It ends ahead of me at the bottom of the alley before rising to the station. A triangular sign edged in red. Slow it says. Pavement, wall, road. Above the viaduct. Then sky. Below tarmac. Another slope to the station. Ping. the gates open and I stand on the platform waiting for the southbound train.

“Language is a noise” I read and think of CW, from the becoming pamphlet Heissenbüttel “IV l” the the new time and new pamphlets, posts and poems in the bad time pairs with (…) the, the poet, po<<>>et. Testifies to the old relevances. The texts that I review on the train going south are not the perfect #translations that translators claim to aim for, but they are perfectly adequate to produce meaning and understanding for the reader… They are texts for readers not translators.

I can produce examples of the failings and successes of human and machine translations but the crucial thing is that the difference between a text in say german or spanish or korean read in translation is irrelevant except for a bourgeois language fetishist. In this world translation is too important to be analysed by intellectuals who think the original language text is somehow more, that a human translator maintains quality. Because experiment is the only guarantee, because experiment is the only proof, because results are the only proof.

Judith Butler has a nice formula relevant for translation. and crucial for machine translation. “universality can only be articulated in response to its own excluded outside. “ What has been excluded from the existing concept of universality puts this concept under pressure. The process by which the excluded is(are) included in universality is what Butler calls #translation. Cultural translation as a return of the excluded… This is extended by machine translation. I read this leaning against a pale blue post on the station, waiting for the train. The text scanned into the machine translator loses all the paragraphs and line feeds. In both the german and the english, it reads well without the paragraphs, showing how the grammer and syntax obscures as much as it reveals.

1.35 PM With machine translation it’s very much like identifying a text, an image when you are uncertain who it is that is depicted. On the train I notice some more plagiarisms in the text I’m reading on the screen (french to german to english) that are still recognisable. The rhythm has changed but the origin is obvious. The point is that there must have been an original. The text was not freely invented. The aluminium uprights have tape wrapped around them. People assume that the text has been freely invented. It’s June 14 1982. The detail must be formally identified as a part. The translation produces a pure fiction. On the phone heading south the Cathedral at Wembley appears as I discuss one of the quotes with one of the other presenters. Sellotape on the chipped glass screen.

The machine has absorbed the skills of human translators, so that I can read the words, phrases, sentences of Heisenbuttel and Wei Ju in english, from geman and mandarin, since the human translators do not care to translate these texts into my major language. Is machine translation a producer of minor language?

Encountered I encountered whom when and where Crossline magpie cuts the October sky raw

2 PM — A world we do not live in : “Any act of translation is fraught with problems. The dense substratum of connotations, resonances, and implicit references that the history of a culture has sedimented into the words and phrases of its language is often simply untranslatable; thus the act of translation is often a rewriting of the original language…” (Teresa de Lauretis)

Her concerns, whilst once valid cannot be ours. We live in a world where an untranslated text, which interests us and perhaps 50 or less other people in the world who do not mind some stylistic and formal errors, can translate a text for their use. (The/A) word is the smallest ideological unit. But she cannot say it. (Not forgetting Arno Schmidt who believed the atoms of words holding the nuclei of meaning which he called etyme (etyms) as in Roh=Mann=Tick) Perhaps we should say that the etymes are the nuclei of the ideological unit… (Serres talks about the reversal of the presumption of incompetance, no longer can we presume the translators competence) “I recognize / I aberkenne / I state / I speak / I do not speak”. The train is electrically singing. I think about the social media debates that were going on yesterday. I was indignant, I forced myself, I conquered it, I write, I do not write. I read and don’t. I ignore them, I take notice. I ignore them, I fell asleep, briefly.

What possible meanings do the words ‘Kind’ and ‘Time’ have in these advertisements on the train? Can I translate them into english? What does the reader think of the errors in the deliberate construction?

3PM — Many years ago, when I was reading, studying the works of Lyotard, I wanted to read Discourse, Figure (title)… this translation technology would have been sufficient, the big blue book arrived and sat on the shelf, unread, long after my interest had ended. “Translating is not passing a text from one language to another. Translating is the art of transferring meaning from one cultural context to another, with all of the nuances this implies…” I am sitting in the second train, plaid patterned seats,. We have reached the tunnel, underground into the city. The tunnel is dark, its mid-afternoon now.

Machine translation is precisely a means of automating this process, the dao of translation…the translator goes on to say “ It is indeed a marvel of technology and a very useful tool for people who need to work as fast as possible. However, the problem is that some only think about cutting costs, even if this sacrifices quality.” The key words in the text from the nameless translator are quality, meaning, risk and cost. The presumption of the translators competence. Here though(t) our primary interests are related to untranslated texts. Texts that have never been translated, from, in my instance, hyper modernist German to English. From 21st century popular Chinese into English. The translators belief in quality that a human translator (re)produces is not relevant as no such translator exists. Does it ever have meaning? is the question I will be posing today.

2.30 PM — Leaving the train. Escalators. Broken stairs, bent and dented brass hand rails. Adverts for Bitcoin financial services on the slope. When people speak of value in this society it always refers to economic value. Dating websites for half a dozen different fetishisms, race, gender, age, (dis)abled, professionalisms, queer, gay and lesbian… websites and photos. How then can we validate the quality and usefulness of the machine translation? One meaningful quality check is to compare a pre-existing human translated text with a machine translation of the same text. How does it compare? How many edits are required to correct any errors that you identify in the comparison texts? When a text is translated by a machine which has no comparative text from a human translator. Can you read and identify errors?

We have left the underground and I’m walking towards my destination, why is it here in this brutalist piece of architecture. Its afternoon now. I stop off at a bookshop, scan the tables for things of interest. Look at the shelves. Lean against the bookshelves and look at the books about “thinking” what does that mean? I buy a new edition and translation of Spinoza. It was once easier to say what writers were writing about. Before formalism, structuralism, the Marxist philosophy of language interrogated the concepts..

The Spiritual Exercises of Helmut Heissenbüttel. Concrete, topography and roller coaster function crime according to rules, self-imposed and practiced, mantra-like and labyrinthine in themselves. The semantics a pleasure, a fragmented erotic moment that stabilizes and forms. I hang on to that thought for a while. I have time to spare so I go into a cafe on the street. The metatextual insertions in the Wei Chu. I read a few sentences, a page or two of the book I have just bought.

I meet with one of the other people at the seminar. We talk about what we are presenting. He is talking about the difficulties in Chinese to English, some of the concepts missing in english. I talk about how machine translation enables the removal of economic value from the act of translation. he recieved a distinction for a thesis arguing that a utilitarian text and a literary text are two different things (which implies that a utilitarian text is not literary and that a literary text is not useful — it goes without saying he said defensively that literature is useful…

4PM — I drink the coffee slowly then put the cup down near the book I am leafing through. my hands touching the tabletop. My right hand writes something in a notebook, I don’t remember what now.. He relaxes abruptly and rest. Some figures appeared on the screen which were immediately taken down by those present. She looked up and looked fixedly at him. She was the only person who comforted me showing me love consideration affection. P was walking by her side in silence. Going to the left without getting close to the row of poles is dangerous. P had stopped looked around holding their breath. A few drops of sweat beaded his face. There is a third type of conflict that occurs when one has set off along a familiar path to pursue a certain end and a new and fascinating opportunity presents itself. (The human translator uses the word NSDAP whereas the original term is Enesdeape… The human translation changing to the english abbreviation loses the meaning of the original contemptuous word. The machine translation is of higher quality than the human translation. The term enesdeape may be more difficult for the reader, but its also more expressive. Heissenbuttel is a deeply utilitarian writer of literature…

4.30 PM — The room is larger than I expected. There are twenty perhaps more chairs in the room. Molded plastic chairs on metal tube frames, wooden table tops on straight legs set in the corners. The windows along the wall have blackout blinds pulled down. I am sitting at the table at the front of the room, beneath the screens and whiteboards. E introduces us. Explains the structure. Is the order agreeable? He asks… Anti-grammatical, anti-syntactical transformation and reproduction of language are effective principles in twentieth and twentyfirst century literature. If we can get past the initial problems that’s what we’ll be tallking about… A brief introduction and then I talk about the advantages of machine translation. The change in the structure of the supply chain. (My slides projecting on the screen.) I walk through the processes and discuss the utility of translation software. I respond to the humanism of the questions. How did this happen? I said. Here in my hand is a copy of Texts Published in 1979 Some decades ago I wanted to read the text Uberbenjamin, this, I was working on Walter Benjamins texts at the time — none of it was translated from the German. Where was the human translator you speak of? No where. For the fifty people in the world who are interested in reading this in english — I ran it through this process. The other speakers replied, explaining romantically why the human translator offers more.

I say “ Capturing the situation with the use of quotations with plagiarism — that is one of our main concern(s). Texts from the literary work of Helmut Heißenbüttel should be compiled, constructed by the (is r)eader, provides an opportunity to get a picture of the situation we are in….”

8PM. I walk out of the institution, some of the people are going to drink and perhaps eat, me, I am walking through the failing light towards the nearest station. It will be a day or so before I will know if it was a successful event. I am travelling home. Unlike Helene Weigel i do not interpret, though i am the interpreter. A lesson in the meaning of translation.

9PM 21.8 grams of freshly ground coffee water through the bottomless filter in a long dark brown stream, 55 grams of espresso, 70 grams of steamed milk… an avantgarde face in white.Two cups. Language. I talk about the seminar with her. Strange Life: Fragments of a text into which all the time other fragments are inserted. But which is the true text? I eat a florentine as I talk about it. The sentences and people I cannot remember. Did you take any photos? She asks. I hand her my phone, she looks at them as we talk. The important ones are the sentences , the inventory of the occasion. Did you have fun? She asked. Yes, though the contradiction between the technologist in love with the machine and me, explaining what the machine can never do. freedom is an impossible thing. The translator was interesting as she talked about translation as a posthumanist effort that takes you out of your comfort zone. Like Brecht and chinese poetry and writing about difficult times.

Afterwards as we eat we watch a japanese drama about a restaurant. At the end of the episode the child accompanies its mother to Paris whilst it’s father stays in Tokyo to cook delicious food.

Standing upright without memory in complete darkness. The ground is wet and slippery. When you lean forward you feel the coldness of the ground as of stone or steel. You can only move forward slowly. When you move forward you feel that the ground consists of large irregular plates separated by narrow but deep grooves.

11PM Tired on the verge of exhaustion, its the middle of the night, we are not really awake, we are a pair of people living through the television and our mobile phones, messages exchanged, we talk, people of dark and motion, only from the distance could we be different, through half-closed eyes, the darkness sliding over us in slow waves whilst we begin to go upstairs, in the kitchen glasses of water — carried upstairs. Reflected in the window we are luminess white threads in the blackness of the outside, the present cutting through the low of time as it slows — we carry ourselves and the glass of water upstairs. We are not here and yet here, too tired people talking as we move, memories already fading. Upstairs discarded clothing on chairs, in the bathroom the whiteness of the tiles shines brightly like a memory of an alien sunset; then you join her in bed, she is still alive reading a novel with a bright orange cover, she laughs at the jokes, and then she breathes in this momenty of history, beginning to sleep as if its for me. It is.

12 Midnight Immediately before falling asleep he considers if there was anything else to say immediately before falling asleep he think of how poetry is so much easier to understand than popular discourse… Her arm is covered in dark blue with white stars, her hand on his back… overnight she changes into her 26 year old body.

3Am He gets up in the middle of the night, though he is not really awake, the corridor to the bathroom is bathed in moonlight, the swish of his barefeet on the wooden floor, darkness and motion; only from this distance, eyes barely open, listenning to the silence, can we see the the darkness, the anti-photons, sliding over the white tiles in slow waves over the bathroom walls and floor, the water flushes in the darkness. A glass of water rinses his mouth — a dark thread of the present cutting through the flow of time. He is here and not here, a man standing and them moving into another room to look out of the window into the moonlioght garden. The personal history and all possible machines and their outcomes. He reads — at the border the animals roared / in the circus tent the lights went out. In the greyness the woman he lies down next to is still alive and asleep, he listens to her breathing in the midst of personal history; tomorrow he’ll do something else. I sleep.

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