harrison moenich : blog

How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, if even for a moment, from its critical apparatus, from its apologists, from its tireless imitators, from its belittlers, from its final lonely destiny? Easy: we must translate it. Let it be done by a bad translator. We must rip out pages at random. We must leave the translation abandoned in some attic somewhere. If after all of this a young reader appears and by reading it makes it theirs, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, who cares) and reinterprets it and accompanies it throughout its journey to its own limits and they both enrich themselves and the young reader adds a pinch of worth to its natural worth, we are standing before something, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to every human being: not a beaten path but a mountain, not the image of the dark forest but the dark forest itself, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.