#rivky

Something that we've been discussing all quarter that the final readings made salient was the co-production of multilingual texts. This was dramatized most clearly in the video of the Antena performance ("Outside, glorious illusion"), where lines of poetry by Lucas and by Levitsky were refracted through one another and through the performers’ translations. Poems changed hands as poets changed tongues. The instantaneous translation seen in this experiment is standard conduct for the interpreter, as we learned in “A Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation.” The work of the human interpreter is more about improvisation than derivation. And yet, in acting as the moderator between two mouths, the interpreter needs to be cooperative to some extent. She's an instigator, mayhaps, but one whose goal is mutual understanding, whose purpose is hermeneutic. 

Why this desire, then, to mystify interpretation in the manifesto? I’m thinking of the following point:

• Interpretation is not translation. Translation is not interpretation. The craft and skills needed for interpretation (oral communication, except in the case of sign language) are remarkably different from those required for translation (written communication). We feel ridiculous when we correct people about these terms. But we are willing to embrace our ridiculousness.

Where might literary interpretation fit in here, especially since interpretation refers to oral communication? Can a literary interpreter be an instigator? Moreover, what happens when we call the translator a reader, or the reader a translator? These questions become more pressing as we reflect on the significance of voice in our rememories of the quarter — speaking in other voices, speaking for other voices, speaking in a voice that speaks for you, (and I add) developing one’s voice as a critic. 

Please pardon this late post, but as I was re-reading Zong! for tomorrow I was suddenly struck by the similarities to avant-garde “cut-ups.” As Tristan Tzara describes it in “HOW TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM,” the cut-up technique involves taking a pair of scissors to a linear text (like a newspaper article) and copying down the strips as you pull them out of a bag to create a poem. William Burroughs and Byron Gysin enlarged upon Tzara’s instructions with their cut-up and fold-in methods; the pastiche novel, The Ticket that Exploded (1962), is just one example of this DIY, anti-literary approach to making language and unmaking narrative. These artists wanted to undo the primacy of the author—"anyone can make cut-ups"—and of the writing event—“all writing is in fact cut-ups” (see The Third Mind). What Burroughs and Gysin make salient is that the words on a page belong to no one, not even the author, and so the product can be attributed to a “writing machine.” 

The reason that this pertains to Philip is that Burroughs and Gysin believed that words “infected” each other when they were reconfigured within a new work. The “contamination” within Zong!, Philip’s metaphorical morgue for the 1781 massacre of the African slaves, travels through human contact—from author to reader—a transference that would not be found in Burroughs and Gysin, at least not a humanistic one. They did not feel ethically implicated in the material they sliced through. It would be difficult to imagine Philip adopting such a surgical approach to the subject matter of Zong! On the contrary, she narrates the production process as if she were restaging the murder herself. Editorial acts performed on the case record like excision and rearrangement take on the full weight of their history when Philip describes them in such macabre terms as those on pages 193-4.