SCALES #59: real, lived-out difference
Hello!
There’s been a lot of excellent concert-going recently. (And more to come!) Last night Apollo’s Fire, the baroque orchestra, performed its first night of an “Echoes of Venice” program, alongside cornetto and (surprisingly dulcet-toned) sackbut players of the Dark Horse Consort.
I hadn’t realized “Echoes” in the program title could be taken extremely literally—a central conceit being the reverberant acoustics of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice being reflected in antiphonal music written by composers such as Monteverdi, Praetorious, and Gabrieli. There’s always something exciting in any artistic medium of witnessing the high-wire act of two people mirroring each other, but/and I really enjoyed the placement of different echoing groups of musicians around the performance space—in the wings, in the aisles, up in the balcony. It made me appreciate anew how the act of listening includes an awareness of space, and my body’s embedding within it, something that often isn’t activated in a concert. A reminder that the urge to experiment with sound and perception in music reaches back centuries, and isn’t confined to monumental high modernist opuses or extremely stereophonic electroacoustic experiments.
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Current reading underway is Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, about translation. I’m the sort of person who always enjoys reading Translator’s Notes for how they pull back the curtain a little on all the finicky little decisions about language and meaning that have to be made, but I like here reading how Briggs thinks through some knotty broader questions about translation.
One thing Briggs picks at is how a reader elides the fact a translated text is not, in fact, the original, and when this pretense falls apart. Her central example is a scene in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, written in German, in which a German character speaks in uncomfortable French that Mann wrote on the page in French. What mental gymnastics are going on when this scene is translated into English, German dialogue is written in English, but the French stays in French? And how about the French translation?
Briggs, a translator herself, also digs into what she finds artistically satisfying about translating, pinpointing I think what can draw people into any activity that requires an in-the-moment confrontation with uncertainty. Looking outside her flat and seeing people practicing parkour, making leaps that have been carefully paced off and practiced, she thinks how in contrast:
“This sentence, on the other hand: I am able to read it, I feel fairly sure that I understand it. But until I start translating it, I’m not yet in a position to tell you exactly where, of what order or of what combination of orders (lexical, syntactical, atmospheric, psychological, ethical…), its difficulties will turn out to be. In this sense, I’m not sure I could practise for them. This not knowing—this not knowing ahead of time, ahead of engaging with the actual doing of it—is a source of—what? Excitement, I’d call it. Great nervous excited excitement. I feel this is important too. Because it is this process of discovery, this adventuring into the writing of a sentence, with no clear idea of what will happen when I start to try, that makes for the real, lived-out different between reading a sentence—even reading a sentence and speculating how I might go about translating it—and the concrete task of writing it in my own language, again.”
The excitement communicated in this passage! The way her means of writing itself—the halting forward progress, the feeling of working out in real time—of amending and clarifying thoughts in real time—enacts this excitement!
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Other reading:
Sandra Boynton has a strong artistic vision. (And also counts Maurice Sendak as a mentor!)
Charming profile of GBBO’s Noel Fielding, many of whose shirts and sweaters I aspire to (h/t Erin).
“The painting is significant because it is the most prominent portrait of the discoverer of vulcanization and one of the few paintings ever executed on a rubber panel.”
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—Adam