Arts Collected Works - Research Publications

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Author: Are, Kay × Type: Textual Work ×

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    Breaking out: Rash translations
    Are, K (Double Dialogues, 2018-09-04)
    'Breaking Out' consists of two series of creative works of very different kinds, though of a piece: First, eight mixed-media prints featuring eight found poems that break up and arrange a dialogue between: 1. The English translation of Derrida’s Glas (1974; trans. 1986); 2. A selection of the critical commentary around Glas, which incessantly credits the work with achieving an absolute break with all genre traditions; and3. The Jean Genet essay on which Glas is, in turn, a commentary, ‘What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet’ (1958; trans. 1985). In the science of map-making, ‘topography’ denotes a place; ‘chorography’ denotes partial places, elements separated out from but sharing in a topos. From the plateaus, you see how crammed all topos is with a tendency to fragment into parts, and how making a whole is enabled by fragmentation. ‘Chorography’ can also slide slyly into relating to khora, i.e. vis-à-vis Plato vis-à-vis Derrida, the substance that enables all being to spring from Being. If writing has a khora — an elemental potentiality prior to all figuration — it must be breakage. Second, eight narrative poems resulting from a writing strategy that tests unfaithfulness as generative conduct. Derrida’s Glas is already a columned text, but its English-language version is embedded with a further column: the translators have left a fistful of selected terms in the French, enclosing them within square brackets, as though suturing a rift that runs the page from top to bottom. What do the translators’ selections say about Glas? Do they instead say something more interesting about the translators? This was always going to be their bind: you translate and thus stray from the beloved original, or you instead refuse to be unfaithful to the French on this word and that and watch your choices run away with the interpretation that they can’t help but impose on the text. I made up a persona to translate those French terms into story with me – a persona who, like me, spoke little French, and who would, therefore, feel licensed to more carelessly open the square brackets on facing pages 204 and 205. We made from those terms a plateau upon which to fabricate a topos and shapeshifted as required to make it right.