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.

Outsider Art and Beyond

 D. Hall: Teddy, ballpoint pen on paper, (2015)

The phrase outsider art was coined by critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English translation for the French term art brut invented by Jean Dubuffet to describe works created outside the boundaries of official culture by those who are often socially marginalized, such as those suffering with mental illness, for example.

Those labelled as outsider artists are typically self-taught and there is often a naive beauty or innocence to their work, which compensates for lack of technique or sophistication. Usually, outsider artists have no contact with the mainstream art world and make no attempt to exhibit or establish careers. In many cases their work, born of solitude and isolation, is discovered - if at all - posthumously and thus makes money only for others; outsider art having now become a successful marketing category within the art world, despite Dubuffet's hope that it would prove immune to this process.

Interest in the art of those who exhibit extreme states of neuro-cognitive disorder and diversity - as well as young children, native peoples, and animals - is, of course, nothing new. Modernism might almost be said to be nothing other than the brilliant (sometimes cynical, often ironic and subversive) imitation and assimilation of such work, rich in unconventional ideas, fantasy, and expressive power. It's certainly true that many important figures associated with the avant-garde were fascinated and inspired by madness and primitivism (and that some had their own very real mental health issues to deal with).   

This interest in outsider practices among modern artists must, of course, be seen as part of a larger project; one that Nietzsche terms the revaluation of all values. Not that my mother, who is ninety and living with Alzheimer's, cares anything about any of this. She just doesn't know what else to do when alone and frightened and unable now to read the paper or follow her favourite programmes on TV other than pick up a pen and draw little pictures of familiar objects and faces.

And I don't think she's ever used the word art in her life or grasps it as a concept; her relation to art can hardly even be described as one of exteriority. In a sense, she's on the outside of that which is outside art and I have no idea what we might call that space ...