Tag Archives: translation

Hidden by the Surface

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Gallix, Andrew, translator. “Trash, Or Tainted Culture” by Octave Debary. Hidden by the Surface: Works About Marine Debris. By Swaantje Güntzel, Herausgeber, 2017, pp. 6-11.

“. . . When Swaantje Güntzel offers us the incongruous spectacle of a cleaning lady diligently vacuuming a field (Staubsauger 2004), she is reminding us that nature produces no waste. This impurity is culture’s privilege, culture’s dirty “sin”, which is that of existence itself. The objective is to express one’s finitude and fear of loss — a loss culture wishes to lose: we seek to get rid of what we produce as it is also the source of our finitude. At the heart of this logic, waste enables us to express the passing of time and the end looming on the horizon; decay and dirt as depletions of life. This is where our contemporary eschatology, linked to environmental disasters, fits in. The more we live, producing ever more waste, the more we pollute the world (an immaculate nature?) where the danger to the environment always comes from culture. It is the border between waste and non-waste that makes our social and cultural condition possible. Waste’s exclusion from culture signals the end of a story that can no longer take place within a cultural context. It must be sacrificed (sacrum) because it is through this process of relinquishment that culture traces the boundary between what is pure and impure. Culture produces waste, which it then excludes. . . .” (original French text by Octave Debary)

To Suspend Even Further

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Kate Briggs, This Little Art

To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief. This can’t really have been what he said (Barthes spoke in French; he claimed to barely speak English at all); nevertheless, I’ll go with it. In this sense, there’s something from the outset speculative and, I would say, of the novelistic about the translator’s project, whatever the genre of writing she is writing in.

Resemblance in the Work of Jochen Gerz

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I have translated Octave Debary‘s Resemblance in the Work of Jochen Gerz (French title: La ressemblance dans l’oeuvre de Jochen Gerz) published by Créaphis éditions on 1 June 2017. It is a bilingual edition, with my English translation appearing on each page beside the original French text.

My aim here is to go on a journey down this road with Jochen Gerz. To strike up a conversation, not so much about his work as one that winds its way through his works. I wish to chart the trajectory I have been following as an anthropologist studying remains and the remains of history, which has led to a decade-long dialogue with Gerz’s oeuvre. Those artworks that he often abandons, once created, offering them up to the city and passers-by. Gerz is one of the foremost contemporary artists of memory and public space.

Translation As Paradigm of All Writing

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Dennis Duncan, “The American Oulipian,” The Times Literary Supplement 27 January 2017

One of his [Harry Matthews] characters muses, “The longer I live — the longer I write — the stronger becomes my conviction that translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing”. It is hard not to read this as Mathews himself thinking out loud.

[See Kafka and Proust.]