The (Displaced) Task of the Translator 3: On the Limits of Zeitgeistiness - A Post by Simon Solomon

Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas)

As the late English poet and essayist Geoffrey Hill insisted, in railing against the problem of our post-Romantic (and/or post-modern) suggestibility, every voice worthy of the name will be organised, at least in part, by a sensibility that combines cultural receptivity and counter-cultural resistance, not to mention a creative misreading of similarly strong precursors. Though the exemplary genius of Hegel's world-historical individuals resided in the propensity of such figures to both suffer and amplify the spirit of their time, the transmissions of the artist - and Kenneth Goldsmith's own thesis depicts translation as indisputably artistic - are not merely barometers, pulse-fingering fashion statements, or 'expressive' of a socio-cultural milieu to which they might even be psychoanalytically reduced. If such zeitgeistiness has its claim, it surely also has its limits. Ultimately, while steeped in their age’s particular species of sadness, the most original artists are Janus-faced, both prophetic and nostalgic, and hence ultimately timeless. While it may be true that the machinic flows of technocapital will one day turn us all into its dehumanised vehicles, there is a (perhaps perverse) love in raging against the machine.

As it transpires, Goldsmith seems not to be wholly in earnest about the disappearance of the subject, when one considers the lingering humanism of his discussion of the musician’s practice of sampling and mixing, emphasising as it does the value of 'mindful recontextualization' in a way that makes him seem to want to have his displaced cake and eat it. I find Goldsmith’s depiction of such techniques of conscious transformation especially congenial in relation to my own emerging translation practice around poetic 'convocations', in which I assimilate fragments from other poetries, films and songs into 'baroque' versions of beloved originals. We can and do beg, borrow or steal from other sources in our work as hipsters, creators or long-suffering makers - and, in an accelerating climate of global exchange, licences and permissions cannot in any case always easily be sought - but should never forget Pound’s modernist credo to 'make it new'. The justification for literary theft is the hunger for innovation ...

Finally, some readers might worry more about the apparent submission of Goldsmith's vision of displaced authorship to a political quietism - the way in which, as he himself concedes, 'the displaced text's entwinement with the latest technology […] aligns it with nefarious capitalist tendencies'. Though his whole point is that what he charmingly calls the 'meatspace audience' is missing the point (since life is less and less 'live' - compulsively played out instead behind or by means of a contemporary surplus of devices, apps and screens), one might wonder if he is not so much throwing the translator’s baby out with the bathwater as electrocuting it in a tsunami of technobubbles.

The ominous promise of a new battened-down all-American protectionism across the pond notwithstanding, if globalised capital is essentially a machine that engenders economic, social and cultural flows, the most interesting individuals, and their art, tend to occur where history slows and condenses. Though Goldsmith's poetics of displacement - a vision that highlights the planet-circling journey undertaken by contemporary translation, and the media by which it is carried - is indebted to our culture of hyper-mobility, there is also (thankfully) a dark art of entrenchment. And it’s not going anywhere …

See: Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).

Note: Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at simonsolomon.ink and a full (non-abridged) version of his essay will shortly be made available here.  

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of a lengthy text that he kindly allowed me to edit into three separate posts for the sake of convenience. Part 1: Magical Realism without the Magic can be read by clicking here. Part 2: Microdramas of Displacement, can be read by clicking here.

The (Displaced) Task of the Translator 2: Microdramas of Displacement - A Post by Simon Solomon

Dede Koswara, aka the Human Tree Man

Image Source: thechive.com

While we may be culturally instructed by Kenneth Goldsmith's undoubted flair for mediating the technological imaginary (albeit in a way that is perhaps already somewhat well-rehearsed, and which is, for me, more originally evoked by the writings of Jean Baudrillard), I feel more moved as a poet by his microdramas of displacement from real life. In his collection of anecdotal horrors and subcutaneous wonders - including, for example, the poignant story of a buried bullet beneath a boy’s face, its impact site permanently cauterised by the heat of the missile, that 'remains comfortably embedded' for the rest of his natural existence - there is a strange rapture of estrangement or post-modern beauty.

What Goldsmith ultimately discloses by telling us the story of a tree that grew around a metal grate erected to protect it until it became, in his luminously lyrical language, 'the guardian of the grate, swallowing it whole, nestling it deep within its core', is a beguiling phenomenology of incorporation: notes towards how we learn to take in and 'live with' foreign matter that have obvious affinities with literary (re)composition. I wondered what Goldsmith might make of less successful manifestations of human embodiment - such as the Indonesian carpenter, Dede Koswara, whose monstrous condition, a fantastically rare skin disorder called Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia (aka ‘Tree Man Syndrome’), caused bark-like cutaneous horns to sprout from his hands and feet and led to him being shunned by his community as an accursed object.

While doubtless more than a sliver of Schadenfreude attaches to such cases, in picking up his own bâton and running with it, Goldsmith extends his project into an inter-disciplinary revisionist thesis, in which acid rain is rebranded as 'displaced weather', petroleum as 'displaced prehistory', the melting ice caps as 'displaced Ice Age' and the Great Pacific garbage patch (aka the Pacific trash vortex) as 'displaced geography'. If this is a schtick of sorts, it is a thrilling one - though thrilling, perhaps, in the manner of a totalitarian music. By contrast, the niceties and decencies of the translator’s traditional craft - its meticulous attunements to the minutiae of syntax, the localities of diction and the pathos of distance - are derisively likened by Goldsmith to the cult of ‘slow food’. To pursue such an obsolescent quest now, on Goldsmith's thesis, is to be a wilful reactionary (though possibly a reactionary who enjoys better digestion), indulging a 'bourgeois luxury', 'faux-nostalgia' and 'a boutique pursuit from a lost world'. The good faith of the translator, that suspiciously friendly idealist forever trying to meet people halfway, is ultimately rotten to the core.

Among a raft of concerns here, one might wonder what place authentic nostalgia - or just real history - could play in such Goldsmith's vision of our creative dispossession, since translation is inescapably also a tradition, not merely a metamorphic instrumentality. Perhaps, indeed, the translator, at their finest, is a kind of time-travelling cultural attaché, drawn back like the former English Laureate Ted Hughes to the shape-shifting mythology of the ancient world, retracing and reimagining their embedded civilisations to keep the culture’s collective unconscious awake.

In a way that stirs my desire to unsettle the strategic dualities of his thought, Goldsmith views displacement as a binary trader, harnessing what can be displaced and jettisoning what cannot, while eschewing what he calls the 'messy questions of morality, ethics and nuance' in favour of 'the craft of the kludge'. Leaving aside the manifold ways in which both literature and life are endlessly (if not necessarily) entangled in such varieties of disorder, I would be interested to learn more about those poetogenic entities the author thinks by implication might defy displacement - about what, in other words, might not get lost in translation ...


See: Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).

Note: Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at simonsolomon.ink and a full (non-abridged) version of his essay will shortly be made available here.  

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of a lengthy text that he kindly allowed me to edit into three separate posts for the sake of convenience. Part 1: Magical Realism without the Magic can be read by clicking here. Part 3: On the Limits of Zeitgeistiness (Or How to Have Your Displaced Cake and Eat It), can be read by clicking here.

The (Displaced) Task of the Translator 1: Magical Realism without the Magic - A Post by Simon Solomon

Kenneth Goldsmith 

Image Source: queensmob.com

Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation.

So claims the title of an ambitious new essay by the New York poet, curator and cultural provocateur, Kenneth Goldsmith. Though its bipolar declaration reads at first glance as curiously equivocal, the author's ostensible desire to oppose a practice he also wishes to renew points rather to a wor(l)d that is no longer what it was. The traditional concept of translation, in a nutshell, is to be badly - which is to say unfaithfully - retranslated. In this usurper's charter, Goldsmith’s withering opening salvo is clearly designed both to antagonise the old guard and clear new interpretive ground:

'Translation is the ultimate humanist gesture. Polite and reasonable, it is an overly cautious bridge builder. Always asking for permission, it begs understanding and friendship. It is optimistic yet provisional, pinning all hopes on a harmonious outcome. In the end, it always fails, for the discourse it sets forth is inevitably off-register; translation is an approximation of discourse – and, in approximating, it produces a new discourse.'

Quaintly conscientious, yet quietly hobbled by its lack of ambition, the classical practice of translation invariably founders on its own tendency to generate novelty. Since such productions go with the territory, however, what the translator should accept - and indeed celebrate - is their activity's irrepressible affinity with the politics of displacement: its complicity, in effect, with wilful miscarriages of (poetic) justice.

Now translators are being everywhere reborn as the renegade children of technology, the utopian spirit of the digital networks is to be channelled and dispersed. In this virtual dispensation, we are all refugees. The new task of the translator, Goldsmith implies, is to embrace their occupation as emblematic of man’s indifference (if not inhumanity) to man, as their dislodged products, borderless and lawless, unapologetically expropriate themselves beyond bodies, identities and the moribund personality cult of the author.

Indeed, as a form of 'magical realism without the magic', displacement 'answers to no one' mainly because 'there's no one on the other end to take the call'. In a pivotal passage that points up Goldsmith’s indebtedness to the flâneur philosopher Walter Benjamin, he contends:

'Displacement is modernism for the twenty-first century, a child of montage, psychogeography, and the objet trouvé. Unlike much modernism, displacement doesn’t move toward disjunction; it trucks in wholes. Schooled in Photoshop and reared in cut-and-paste, the world is now our desktop. Drop-and-drag architecture: pick up something and plunk it somewhere; it soon becomes natural. Displacement is Duchamp for architecture. Frank Gehry is a master of architectural displacement; Bilbao - a fantasy displaced off a CAD screen - soon becomes a beloved Basque landmark.'

The dialogical conscience of translation has been superseded by a 'boundless annexing machine' that 'sucks indiscriminately' as a shameless infant on the flickering nipples of cosmopolitan culture - culture, it is clear, that has long since failed to serve as a mother. In a decontextualised economy of viral reproduction, it may take a (global) village to raise a child, though not necessarily a human one.

But this economy, for Goldsmith, is also an ecology, illimitably extending the transcendental dispossession of language while the relentlessly replicative online ecosystem recycles its resources 'in bizarre Frankensteinian artifacts', ranging from multi-sourced PDF pseudo-book assemblages to Hollywood blockbusters with Telugu subtitles. If this is all monstrously poetic, its analogues are indissociably political. What might darkly be called the datafication of the human is the contemporary modus of transnational technocapitalism, driven by the indifferent engines of its displacement apparatus that 'spits its subjects across the globe, redundantly segmenting and replicating them […] thereby minimizing chances for loss while increasing chances for totality'.

If the effect of this global dispersal is to orphan translation by ripping up its roots, re-routing its genealogies, puncturing its pedantries and saturating its markets - driving, in effect, its whole humane history over the cliff of technology - the happy outcome for Goldsmith is a 'playful anarchy' in which homophonic transformations (think van Rooten's delicious nonsense rendering of 'Humpty Dumpty / sat on a wall' as 'Un petit d'un petit / S'étonne aux Halles') become the irreverent gambits of a ludic poetics distinguished by its abandonment of all writerly ownership or privilege.

For those of us who might defiantly trumpet the tendency of the talented toward a strategic singularity, the ambition here would seem to go further than merely purging late-Romantic souls of their residual preciousness. Rather, the rules of the language game of translation are being dazzlingly rewritten - liberated (or deconsecrated) in a blizzard of technics.

See: Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation, (Jean Boîte Editions, 2016).

Note: Simon Solomon (aka Dr Simon Thomas) is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at simonsolomon.ink and a full (non-abridged) version of his essay will shortly be made available here.

Simon appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm. I am very grateful for his submission of a lengthy text that he kindly allowed me to edit into three separate posts for the sake of convenience. Part 2: Microdramas of Displacement can be read by clicking here. Part 3: On the Limits of Zeitgeistiness (Or How to Have Your Displaced Cake and Eat It), can be read by clicking here.