"There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable"
March 28, 2015 11:42 AM   Subscribe

Variations on the Right to Remain Silent is an essay by poet and classicist Anne Carson about translation, cliché, divine language and the way some words violently resist being explained. She touches on Homer, Sappho, Joan of Arc, Friedrich Hölderlin, and the painter Francis Bacon.
posted by Kattullus (6 comments total) 41 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for posting this. It's wonderful.
posted by Rinku at 12:09 PM on March 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Having just finished The Autobiography of Red (like, literally, half an hour ago), I feel compelled to say something, but I don't really know what.

Fishing for the word that stops itself.
posted by magmagmag at 1:04 PM on March 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Related: if you've not read Nox or Autobiography of Red, please do so right away. They are both astounding creative works that tug at the heart.
posted by Fizz at 1:43 PM on March 28, 2015 [4 favorites]


Anne Carson is amazing. HUGE fan of Nox and Autobiography of Red.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:50 PM on March 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Well, I also enjoyed this a lot but (partially in the interest of stimulating conversation), I want to pick at some of Carson's assumptions.

First, though, I want to say that I love the concept of divine words that simply have no meaning for humans. And the line from Joan of Arc: The light comes in the name of the voice. Which seems wonderfully surreal and evocative--it makes me think of the John Crowley novel The Deep where some characters who have something like secret identities speak of "the name of my name." Like, my name is David but the name of my name is Michael. That line also makes me think of various mystical experiences and the concept of the ineffable.

But other places in this essay poke at me. For example, Carson approvingly describes Bacon's war against cliche:
When Francis Bacon approaches a white canvas its empty surface is already filled with the whole history of painting up to that moment, it is a compaction of all the clichés of representation already extant in the painter's world, in the painter's head, in the probability of what can be done on this surface. Screens are in place making it hard to see anything but what one expects to see, hard to paint what isn't already there. Bacon is not content to deflect or beguile cliché by some painterly trick, he wants to assassinate it right there on his canvas. So he solicits the interventions of chance. He makes what he calls "free marks" on the canvas, both at the beginning when it is white and later when it is partly painted or completely painted. He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand or just throws a can of paint at it. His intention is to disrupt its probability and to short-circuit his own control of the disruption.
Is the tradition of painting really so bad? Are novelty and originality the only or most important virtues of art? I tend to think art as in conversation, in dialogue with what has come before--that the earlier generations of creations provide a kind of scaffolding or shared vocabulary that makes new creations possible or comprehensible.

And the idea of chance being a way out of the influence of tradition--whether you think of that as the chains of cliche, as Carson paints it or as a kind of foundation--I'm not so sure that this works very well. It seems like a dead end to me. I mean, once another painter does the same thing, doesn't that enfold the technique back into the dialogue, back into suspicion as being cliche? And it seems like you could either go totally random, not trying to make the work representational or else if you do work representations in, the random elements could easily become blips--the way that a person carving a piece of wood might use a blemish to represent an eye or a mouth, which is old, has been done before, countless times.

Similarly, I thought that Carson's rendition of the Garden of Eden story felt more than a little forced. Like she was imposing this model of free marks on the story rather than discovering it there. I mean, this statement Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn't the simple fact of the matter that she was bored? seems pretty iffy to me. Maybe there's some issue of translation that I'm not aware of, but the original story in Genesis does mention a tempting snake and doesn't say anything about boredom.

That said, looking over the essay again, I'm in love with her sharp and evocative metaphors and images.
posted by overglow at 8:02 PM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]


overglow: Is the tradition of painting really so bad? Are novelty and originality the only or most important virtues of art? I tend to think art as in conversation, in dialogue with what has come before--that the earlier generations of creations provide a kind of scaffolding or shared vocabulary that makes new creations possible or comprehensible.

I understood Carson to be saying pretty much that. In the part about Joan of Arc Carson says:
Joan wanted to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological cliché. It is her rage against cliché that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage.
Joan of Arc was in conversation with her judges, but she was refusing to use the language that they expected. That doesn't mean that she wasn't in conversation, and in fact, the conversation was necessary to draw out of her the particular language that she used.

It's the same with Bacon, he knew well the language of painting, but wanted to move away from it to something different. Because he knew the map so well, he could move towards something different, partly by using free marks, but also by doing things that weren't supposed to be done. The Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X referenced by Carson is a very good example. It's in conversation with the past, but is also moving into different ways of expressing.

Which is, I think, pretty much Carson's method. She's constantly in dialogue with the past. Most obviously the authors of antiquity, but also with all the later poets and scholars who've made use of and interpreted these same ancient writers. But she also moves into unknown lands, looking for expression that isn't cliché. But she can only do that because she's so well versed in the long history of poetry.
posted by Kattullus at 3:45 AM on March 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


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