Being Translated
Being Translated
R.M. Wilcher
On the table, there is a book, Jean-Louis Chrétien’s Loins des premiers fleuves, lying open to a poem which has no name. I’ve simply given it the designation “Untitled Nine.” In the second line, there is a verb which, in English, has no equivalent. That is not to say that any word when invited over from one tongue to another ever forms a one-to-one equivalent, especially given that every language has intimacies known only to those who root themselves within its particular hospitality, like the curtain folds of my childhood home in which I once enshrouded myself. But this word is particularly tricky. It could mean one of two opposite actions: either to scatter or something in the range of to gather, to collect, or to count. It could mean all of it once. Chrétien has purposefully placed the verb within a context (an image of dust in the wind) which offers little clarity. I have opted to translate it as to gather because to collect has a permanence which to gather does not. Things collected are more likely intended to be stored up and horded away; things gathered can be scattered again in the wind.
My translation reads,
Without end the dust
gathers the sudden
lapses of wind
I have no guarantee that my rendition is the best; in fact, I know it isn’t. To count would be the most literal. But I have tried to leave open its ambiguity, the possibility of its opposite, and attempted to land somewhere in between all of its possibilities. I am translating the one in order implicitly to include the others, and in so doing I navigate its between-ness. Translators are often navigating a word’s between-nesses, perpetually at play in a “broken middle” (to appropriate poorly a term coined by the late Gillian Rose) between words—inviting, coaxing, wooing sense across the expanse of the impossible, interpreting infinitely other intimacies. It is an act which is never wholly complete, and yet the end result is hopefully a readable translation. A translation is itself something of a between. It is at once the original and an image of the original, these words but not, at once res (the thing itself) and signum (the sign), an alter ego, never quite wholly either. That is really how everything in the world is—at least that is what Platonists like myself tend to think; the world exists as a between. A translation is a new world, and the world is a translation of divinity.
To understand what I mean, it may require one once again to take up the imagination of ages past, an imagination which is more or less lost to us now. The Church Fathers (and Plato before them) imagined our world as metaphysically situated in between formless nothingness and the infinite fullness of being, the Good Itself, or God. Finite being, sung out of nothing, was the gift of participation in the Triune God. In every case of particular entities, in the life of each and every thing, this participation could been seen and understood: a narcissus flower never ceases to be a narcissus flower (a sign that it is upheld in the mind of God, per St. Augustine, by the eternal idea of narcissus-ness), and yet it undergoes change, buds, blooms, withers, and dies (a sign of its finitude and frailty, its incapacity to encompass that idea totally in itself). It is imago narcissus in the way that we humans are imago Dei. Every narcissus realizes in part the superabundant possibility of the original, and each strives repeatedly to realize this idea deeper and deeper.
Every narcissus “repeats differently” the same eternal idea of narcissus-ness in the way a translation repeats differently the original words of another language, so says the Anglican metaphysician Catherine Pickstock. In this frame, this narcissus here is a kind of translation of the infinite into the finite. It does not close off the infinite but, on the contrary, opens out the finite into the infinite and even brings the infinite intimately closer to the finite. That is why the 19th-20th Century French philosopher Maurice Blondel can write, “I walk beneath the weight of the infinite.” Where a thousand narcissus flowers lie along a hillside, each unfolds the original’s superabundant possibility ever and again anew. In this way, not only is the world as a whole a between and a repeating differently of its eternal original in God, but so are each and every thing in the world. Every little thing is a world unto itself, singing back its own harmonious intimacy to the God who is more present to it than it is to itself.
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Our various arts and forms of enquiry are explorations of the various between-nesses of these worlds within our world. Each art and science is directed ultimately, and whether or not such disciplines are aware of it, to the Original from which they derive their being. The brunt of modern science is a navigation between physical causes (usually chemical and electrical) and their effects. Depending on who one asks, philosophy is (crudely) a navigating between terms and claims to truth or else (even more crudely) a navigating between the self and the world. Theology is the science or art of navigating between God and humanity. The art of translation navigates between words in one language and another. Admittedly, I am not sure what sort of between it is that poetry navigates, but painting is a bit more apparent. The painter explores the between of images and their originals, between the painted narcissus and this narcissus among a thousand others which bursts white and pink along a single undulation of hill. Various styles and forms of painting navigate the between-ness of things differently, touching along various aspects of the originals, just as various methods in the sciences can treat differently the same essential objects. The original does not have to be something material in the world (the narcissus), for abstract expressionism and especially the works of Wassily Kandinsky (I think especially of his Composition X), along with entire traditions of religious art are there to remind us that the spiritual is also there to be painted, translated into terms which the unversed can more easily, or at least intuitively, grasp.
If everything is “between” and every art is a navigating the between, then to be true to the task of art, the artist must stand in a place between everything. The genius of the artist is not mastery of skill (nor the skill of mastery) but the un-mastering of her voice and vision to a middle place between things, mediating one thing to another. She becomes middle-voiced, both active and passive, both the giver and the recipient of form. Those who have ever experienced what is called “inspiration” are no doubt familiar with this sense that one is both making and merely instrumental in a higher making, and being thus the artist feels oneself made, unmade, remade in a moment. Still, the artist lends her voice to both poles of between-ness, to the copy and the original, to the finite and the eternal, in order that they can speak their intimacies, their belonging to each other. And it is not simply to each other that they speak.
By mediating their silent voices, the artist addresses this speech to the lovers of art and the lovers of the things navigated. This, I think, is why Russian literary critic and sophiologist Vladimir Solovyov can speak of the artist as a prophet. The artist whose voice middled is a prophet of the between and therefore a real prophet, a prophet of the real. Allowing art and reality to speak their belonging to each other, as ambiguous and broken as that belonging remains, is the spiritual task of art. However, in the modern period, we have mostly failed to retrieve again (to repeat differently, if you will) the imagination of the Fathers, and therefore, especially in the case of René Magritte and his much praised The Treachery of Images, this task has often been scorned in favor of irony.
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Magritte’s infamous This Is Not a Pipe—among his others, which lay the modern framework for both oxymoronic virtual reality and the idea of the internet meme—transfigures ambiguous belonging into a rationalist’s clarity of unbelonging. The painting depicts what might ordinarily appear to be a common tobacco pipe with the caption cesi n’est pas un pipe. The pipe painting does not allow the image and the original to speak their belonging to each other; instead, Magritte speaks for them. His n’est pas (“is not”) sets the image of the pipe over and against what a pipe really is and thereby sets art over and against reality. He clarifies the essential ambiguity of the between of art (where harmonious wonder ought to spring up and water parched lands surrounding), and he makes it a no man’s land between trenches, beating one side down with artillery shells of irony. Magritte’s work is a severing of the repetition of things and signs the dehiscence of reality itself. It scorns the hospitality of the real, attempting an escape into the sur-real—more accurately, the sub-real. The painting is translated right out of the world. It should be said, however, that Magritte has mistaken irony for the truth itself, the ultimate double irony, and it is only when irony is mistaken for truth itself that art can produce the virtual. Irony, after all, is a sign of some implied truth waiting to be revealed.
Other attempts have been made to clarify or even explain away the betweenness of art. I think particularly of American minimalism in the 1960s with its goal of eliding all referential power in the objects of art. Where surrealism sought to disconnect signum from res, minimalism sought to erase the signum altogether, to do away with art’s capacity to speak at all. For minimalism, the objects of art held no reference to other forms. This square did not belong to other squares or sign the meaning of squareness. It was simply there. There is no intimacy to translate, only brutal shapes in space. And thus, the infamous phrase by one of minimalism’s foremost figures, Frank Stella: “What you see is what you see.” Reference, however, is irreducible. It was Agnes Martin, whose own work stands to this day between minimalism and abstract expressionism, who signaled minimalism’s ultimate failure to elide reference which, for those of us who can appreciate a movement for its failure, is its greatest achievement. Martin’s navigation through the aporia left in minimalism’s wake opened her out into a Platonist and Augustinian appreciation of beauty in everything, especially friendship.
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It was in Kettle’s Yard that I discovered the between-ness of things for myself. The wonderful art museum curated, and once lived in, by the Edes is one of the great testaments to art’s ineliminable capacity to sing its participation in the real, and ultimately in God. Jim and Helen Ede transformed their own home into an art gallery in the late nineteen-fifties and made it open to the public. Every room navigates the between of things by intentionally placing workaday household items amongst the art that hangs on walls and rises from dining room tables. The art, in turn, beckons its welcome to the mundane things. For example, in the living room, Joan Miró’s surrealist painting Tic Tic has a small yellow sphere in its lower right corner; on the coffee table along an adjacent wall, a lemon (which is replaced every week by the current museum staff) rests in a little bowl. The yellow sphere in the painting spells the real yellow lemon, and thus what was meant to escape the real is suddenly ever more enfolded within it, and I stand somewhere between them.
I, as an art viewer, must navigate the real space of the house in order to allow its between-ness to come to full bloom in my bodily perceptions and in my very soul. I am called to respond to, and even somehow participate in the art by moving about the Ede’s home. In a bedroom, David Jones’ magnificent Vexilla Regis hangs behind an open door. In order to see the painting properly, I must get somewhat behind the door and in the way of everyone coming in and going out of the room by it. In order to see it, I go on a kind of quest like the one for the Holy Grail towards which the painting itself gestures. To take up the quest by moving about the room is no longer to remain a mere “art viewer”, a perfectly detached modern subject cut off from my own participation in the world. Participating in the art as its observer (as its witness), I renew my belonging in the world. As I sat in a chair in that room with Vexilla Regis, I became translated back into the real with all my little intimacies previously unknown even to myself.
I return again to my translation. The reasons for leaving the ambiguity of the verb unclarified have, I hope, become clear. To pick one pole or its opposite, both abundantly possible meanings, would be to do what Magritte did with his pipe or what the minimalists did with their structures – it would be to neglect the intimacy and the belonging of art with reality and the belonging of reality in God. I am trying to put my little voice in the middle of all of that fray and ineliminable possibility as best I can manage, and while it is not capable of doing it perfectly, in attempting it I discover yet another voice, some helper singing along beside me, some inner teacher guiding my middled words.
To translate these words on the page from French to English, I am no longer an unencumbered observer, a mere pair of eyes hanging above the white ground where the words happen. I, too, am suddenly translated, or perhaps transfigured into a participant in the real through the mediation of art. I am walking through the Ede’s house. I am, for lack of a better term, transubstantiated (for who is it really that is being devoured in the Eucharist?). I take this body and bread into me, but I am also incorporated into a Body. Through art, as through the Eucharist, I become transfigured into what I have always already been: intimately within the folds of the curtains of the world, filled with light.
Nothing ever escapes the middle; I don’t know why anything or anyone would want that. To escape the real is but to drift into nothingness, scattered into the void rather than gathered into fullness, gathered “to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / crushed.” Art, like everything which is here for a moment and, like Chrétien’s dust in the sudden lapses of wind, is gone the next, nevertheless beckons us to gaze infinitely deeper within and out beyond the world. From the vantage of this broken middle which we artists and enquirers inhabit, art is a witness that our desire for God outweighs the world by absolutely affirming the world, so that everything, especially ourselves, might be transfigured into glory, translated into the intimacy of God.
R.M. Wilcher
Writer & Academic
Find more of R.M. Wilcher’s work at michaelwilcher.com
Photography by Igor Dernovoy