Susana Medina, Philosophical Toys, Bilingual edition, Araña Editorial, 2012, Trans. by Rosie Marteau with the author... And Anne McLean. // Dalkey Archive Press, 2015.
www.susanamedina.net/Home.html
www.susanamedina.net/Red_Tales/Red_Tales.html
video:
Nina, a young drifter from Spain, finds that the strangest of stories is hiding in her father's loft in Almería: there she finds ninety-five pairs of shoes, and this discovery propels her into a series of adventures, inquiries, and reflections on the material world. Was her father a pervert? What's the difference between fetishism and consumerism, anyway? Philosophical Toys is a naughtily cerebral novel about our relationship with objects, filled with ruminations on sexuality, money, and Luis Buñuel.
‘A shockingly beautiful innovative voice in which the sublime and laughter are perfectly matched’ Andrew Gallix
‘This collection will come as a total shock to mummy porn fans – E. L. James meets J. G. Ballard! Makes both writing and BDSM dangerous once again. Eat your heart out literary establishment’ Stewart Home
‘Medina writes unglossy fables of strangeness and curiosity in those penumbral regions of the earth visited between memory and conjecture. The sharp and cunning constructions are like the relics out of Borges’s library, bones of unborn stories that honour fate and run beyond prediction. Each is a perfectly wrought performance, presenting not so much strange sights or unknown spectacles but instead elegant mementos of sensual moments we too often pass over either in impertinent silence or baffled fear. Medina unearths the small beauties that we like to rebury. Her stories are exquisite reminders of our weird informal freedoms and the zealousness of an inflamed, sexy imagination. This is a book of wonders’ - Richard Marshall
‘A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise’ - Will Self
‘The everyday worlds of these stories are glamorous & disturbing, compelling & reckless; they are neural maps of consumer surfaces & psychological uncertainties, their inner landscapes demand our attention’ - Steve Finbow
‘Medina's writing is both intriguing and involving, probing the margins of narrative as it does, yet still carrying a strong emotional charge. Her subject matter lies in London's demi-monde, and is compelling and often dramatic. This collection will stay with me’ - Peter Carty
‘Her personal profile reveals a writer but most of all a writing. A singular writing, a unique voice that leads us through a labyrinth that is dark and yet under a luminous sky’ - J. A. Masoliver Ródenas,
‘A tremendously restless vision which relentlessly traverses genres and styles’ - Ruben H y Mónica Bergos
‘A cult and thoroughbred writer’ - Marisol Oviaño
Philosophical Toys, chapters 1-3, 'The sex-appeal of the inorganic', 'Mona Lisa’s demonic laughter' & 'My mother’s resurrection'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 4-6 'A cellar in a loft', 'The paradise of forgetfulness' & 'The snowing dream'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 7-8 'Leather-bound stories' & 'The penis nightmare'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 9-11 'The dehumanisation of artists', 'The museum of relevant moments' & 'Anything strang'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 12-14 'The money kindergarten', 'A headless, small plastic elephant' & 'Zia Carla's letter'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 15-17 'Fast-forward, rewind', 'Childhood trance interlude' & 'Pearl, Snow and the insistence of the fetish'
Philosophical Toys, chapters 18-19 'Anima blandula days' & 'A
Philosophical Toys, chapters 20-21 'Mortality sucks' & 'The cloning passion, a sort of footnote'
Philosophical Toys, chapter 22 'The ubiquitous lullaby'
Spinning Days of Night (in The White Review)
Susana Medina, Red Tales, Trans. by Rosie Marteau with the author and Anne McLean. Araña Editorial, 2012.
Red Tales (Araña Editorial, 2012, translated by Rosie Marteau with the author and Anne McLean), a collection of eight explosive short stories by the Spanish-English writer Susana Medina, takes the reader through a whirling range of styles, textures, voices, centuries and geographical places. Her writing enters physical spaces and human consciousnesses revelling in the places between experience and understanding.
One of the shortest stories in this collection, ‘The Darkened Rooms’, begins with the sentence
‘CANCELLED DUE TO LACK OF DIRECT EXPERIENCE’.
Its seemingly rambling and yet ever-so-sharp sentences paint a tragic picture of that prelapsarian time before AIDS, when men had sex ‘happily condom-less’. Our female narrator muses, Orlando-like, on what it would be like to live in a man’s body, reminding us of the fluidity and randomness of gender and its attendant experiences. Medina pretends to withhold the story from her readers and in doing so gives us more than a story. he offers up emotions, ideas and propositions with a wit and playfulness that can be seen throughout her work.
The opening story, ‘The Ironic Grey Hair’ (its title alone made me want to pick up this collection), is the tale of Lula, an academic, whose thwarted late-night attempt to get into a London fetish club while carrying an air pistol echoes the danger and exhilaration of sex itself. Will she get in, will she not? Eventually Lula ends up on the pavement, her pistol confiscated by a bouncer, nursing one friend’s injured head while her other accomplice has sex with a tranny in the back seat of a car. It is hilariously funny and surreal and yet seems to contain within its latex boundaries so much about life that is true: in our inexorable journey towards death we are confronted with the mundane truth about life, here embodied in a grey pubic hair that features in Lula’s reckless dreams. It is in essence a story about the way that life itself feels real because of its inherent fleetingness. The last lines of the story, physically disappearing from the page as they get smaller and smaller, read like an echo:
‘tomorrow’s another day. Or the day after that. Or the next day. Or the next day. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next. Or the next…’
Lula is young enough to feel she still has time, and old enough to see the preciousness of life. She hovers between knowing about nothingness and knowing that she will eventually become part of it.
This existential nothingness is embodied in Medina’s final story, ‘The Space of the Tangible Hallucination’, in which Ella, the object of the narrator’s love, tries to erase her existence by burning her possessions and painting every surface of her house in ‘hyperbrilliant white paint’. In doing so, Ella also erases the narrator’s existence from her life. In one beautifully described scene,
‘Ella holds a tear now transformed into saliva that slides down her throat as if she were crying on the inside’.
Our skin tries to keep out what might harm or even kill us, but in these stories boundaries, be they walls or membranes, often fail. Medina’s stories are meditations on the fluidity of life.
The character in ‘The Stranger’s Maid’ fantasises about wearing
‘a full body condom when she goes out so she doesn’t catch anything because you can also catch invisible diseases’.
The porous quality of physical borders is also reflected in the mental states of Medina’s characters. Elle, the ‘dykette’ in ‘The Space of the Tangible Hallucination’, morphs into a knight whose one desire is to save the object of his/her desire. ‘I am, above all, a true gentleman,’ she proclaims.
But Medina’s power to transform characters from one state to another is not absolute. The mother of the central character from ‘The Stranger’s Maid’ states,
‘If men could have abortions, the clinics would be full. Since men can’t have abortions, they invented society and culture.’
There are limits, after all, to our ability to transcend our biology. Elle experiences another type of transformation when the object of her love begins to disgust her:
‘I suddenly detest her determination … I detest the way she combs her long red hair with her head leant to one side, her blue-tinged skin, her grey eyes, the way she holds her tea cup. I detest her sudden lows that obliterate everything and how she applies hyperbrilliant white paint to the wooden floor. I detest her skill and everything I loved about her before, I now detest.’
Love and hate, male and female, tears and saliva: everything crosses boundaries despite our best attempts to shore up distinct demarcations between states.
‘The Farewell Letter’ is probably the most poetic story in the collection. It is an epistolary meditation on love and loss and the ability to be transformed by passion. The unnamed narrator has been shattered into myriad selves like colours from a prism by a love she both desperately wants and yet simultaneously rejects. Sex and filth and death converge here when the narrator describes a one-night stand in a hotel in Mexico with a man she meets on the motorway:
‘And I think of the hundreds and hundreds of bodies that have passed through this room, the hundreds and hundreds of bodies that have passed through my own body, realising now that I’m a hotel, a hotel room complete with a bathroom where they’ve all deposited their shit, their implausible embraces, their rehearsed words, repeating my name in a bed where they’ve all left their fluids, their pubic hairs and their mange … I’m going to start charging from now on, sick of all these bodies, so many bodies dying all over me as if I were a graveyard.’
This woman must come to accept her fragmented self rather than reconcile its parts, and we last see her wandering ‘peacefully about the abysses of the tangible.’ This is pure Medina, this acceptance that life’s problems cannot be fixed but instead must be turned into intense lived or chronicled experience.
What Medina’s stories do is to examine the mess of life, its filth, its passion, its fleeting moments of beauty and pain and love and loss. She places everything before us, like the lover in her story ‘Where Butterflies Flutter Creating Chemical Turbulence’, who tells the man whose body she craves:
‘our juices on the palate, in the throat, between the gums, a kiss is a world: your sweat: I want to eat you, fuck you and leave you prostrate for days: sore, exhausted, deprived of movement: I want to bite you until it hurts. And I want to see you bleeding.’
The cannibalistic elements here are the logical end of a desire that takes one beyond lust towards consuming the other so it becomes one’s self. I am reminded of The Taste of a Man, Slavenca Drakulic’s dark tale of a man-eating woman.
These formally inventive tales add up to an unflinching and visceral collection of stories which fragment and coalesce in surprising ways: Borges as written by Poppy Z Brite and Virginia Woolf. Susana Medina’s stories have an alchemical quality, throwing together disparate elements to create tender and terrifying reminders of what it is to be human: the danger and thrill of our appetites and the limits of our reason. - Joanna Pocock
Susana Medina, Souvenirs
of the Accident
A collection of aphorisms,
ballads and poems
Translations by Peter
Cooke, Jonathan Dunne & Susana Medina
kamikaze knots
The encounter
Susana Medina’s writing is not autobiographical
and nevertheless autobiography is what establishes the nexus between the
personal and the generational, between the individual and the collective. Her
personal profile reveals a writer but most of all a writing. A singular writing,
which is marked, like her life, by uprooting. It might be said that there is a
process that stems from the personalization to dissolve itself in participation,
which in turn returns, at once desolate and triumphant, to the personal. This
could explain the obsessive way she revolves around a plurality of ‘I’s in
Cuentos Rojos / Red Stories. This dissolution of the first person doesn’t
necessarily lead to an encounter. We get the feeling that everything she’s
telling us (in her prose and in her poems) are experiences that have already
happened, of which nothing remains other than the voice of the narrator. We
listen to her voice in a labyrinth of flights and losses.
That would explain the coexistence of familiarity
(the reader’s empathy with her writing) and estrangement in her texts. An
estrangement that comes from this living loss as a present moment made of images
and words we know no longer exist. An estrangement due also to Susana Medina’s
special relationship to the world and the culture of her time, for which she
simultaneously feels fascination and disgust. A peculiar uprootedness that
consists not so much in not having roots but in having roots in various places.
Not in creating a unique space, a centre that gives us an illusion of reality
and that we invent to calm our existence, but different centres that express the
need to search for a unity that goes beyond the limits established by normality
and norms. Uprootedness and estrangement mean here non-conformity and a denial
of conventional reality, this wall behind which the true and worrying reality
hides.
Susana Medina’s very upbringing expresses this
estrangement, and the peculiarity of her uprootedness. Born in England, her
childhood and adolescence, so present in her work, were spent in Valencia. Back
in London, she studied Italian and Art History. She writes in Spanish and
English alike and to her interest in art must be added her recent incursion into
cinema. Keeping her distance from the literary world and the pressure to
publish, she has nevertheless contributed to various radical magazines, which
reflects another aspect of Susana Medina: her vehement independence.
To the uprootedness, estrangement and
independence must be added upheaval. There is a clear rejection of the
contemporary world and at the same time a suicidal fascination. All her writing
is a search for traces and the meaning of traces and an escape from society’s
conventions. A conflictive relationship with people and a primitive relationship
with things comes as no surprise: attraction and rejection, search and
misencounters, the ascent to the universal and planetary and the attraction of
the abyss, all within the sphere of the labyrinth and the fetish. The same life
is, in Susana Medina’s writing, a space and in this space images come to life
that a voice, a narration, recuperates from the emptiness of loss and abandon.
These obsessions explain the unifying character
of her writing as a unique and incessant project, thus the continuous
re-elaborations of the various subtexts of a single text that can be shuffled
like a deck of cards. Souvenirs of the Accident is a very clear example of this
incessant simultaneity, of these continuous surprises that nevertheless are, or
seem to be, familiar to us. This book is a re-elaboration of initially
independent texts written at different stages as distinct projects, but their
charm lies precisely in this unique voice that leads us through a labyrinth that
is dark and yet under a luminous sky: the expressive naturalness, the narrative
will, the humour, an audacity that rejects experimentalism and an erudite
undertone that rejects pretension, all give clarity to this writing.
Each part of the book is conceived in a very
distinct way and with very distinct modes of expression, a series of obsessions
that fashion the narrative voice’s world. ‘Souvenirs of the Accident’ could be
considered as the beginning of a long prologue that leads to an epilogue. They
are poems in free verse whose rhythm is marked by oscillations of different
registers, especially the narrative and reflexive, as well as by a structure
that sketches out or gives body to the poem’s voice. Here Susana Medina
identifies with the ‘nirvana’ writers of the nineties who found their greatest
exponent in Ray Loriga and who go back to Mariano Antolín Rato to express a
metaphysics, an integrating conscience that overcomes the tyranny of preceptive
reason and of disintegrating science. To this apocalyptic vision is added the
emptiness and solitude of the ‘protagonist’ (if we accept these texts as a
narration). Violence, fear, vertigo before the inexplicable, lead to madness and
catastrophe but also to freedom.
There is intensity of sentiment but no
sentimentality. To this wounded world Susana Medina opposes the stimulus of
memory, of dreams and fantasy, the acceptance of ugliness, the drawing near to
things and to the body in a suggestive androgynous sexuality that expresses her
rejection of conventions. Her poetry is conceived as a metamorphosis, as a
continuous process of transformation that distances itself from superficial
reality to penetrate more profound labyrinths of reality. In this sense, ‘La
rosa alucinada’ is a key poem to understand the nature of hallucination and
madness in a painful and at the same time liberating process. ‘Líos kamikaze’
turns out to be the prose epilogue, which at the same time brings us closer to
‘Poema 66’. First, second and third persons dissolve in the encounter of bodies,
in the rites of violence, in the acceptance of death and in the aspiration to be
as light as a sigh. It is also an erotic poem, insofar as sexual freedom brings
us closer to eroticism.
‘Medinations’, in a play on words that goes
further than a simple anecdotal pirouette, is a collection of aphorisms where,
again, the narrative character of the voice creates a sensation of development,
that is, of unity, in a writing that is precisely the search for a greater unity
beyond violence and catastrophe. Here many of the things posed in the earlier
two parts or ‘books’ become explicit around ‘contemporary evil,’ ‘the patina of
fear,’ ‘the appearance of truth,’ the power of the norm, destructive, creative
and utopian impulses, intuition or transmutation.
This, in its turn, constitutes a prologue to
‘Poem 66’, where the second part or ‘Epilogues’ are on a level with a reading or
interpretation in prose of the long poem dedicated to Lolita. An interpretation
that underlines the ambiguous nature of a clearly autobiographical character
contaminated by the resonance of Nabokov’s character. The sentimental education
of a twelve-year-old girl is perfectly integrated into the whole of the book and
gives it a more personal tone. The verses (their measure, their evolution) arise
from the demands of the narration to become the steps of a staircase, a spiral,
a feline, an escape, the evolution of luminous and painful instants of puberty.
Where there was a hallucinated rose now there are ‘hallucinated apples.’
Lolita/Susana experiences the violence of the family milieu and the violence of
society in the sixties in a sort of chronicle that lasts up to the present.
Lolita is a girl wounded by physical violence, didactic violence and
psychological violence and can only find her salvation, her ‘ascent’ into the
abyss.
Souvenirs of the
Accident is a book of rare lucidity, made of images that aspire to reconstruct a
world and create a world in the midst of chaos. A book written in several
directions because ‘to be coherent art must fire in every direction.’ And one
that, nevertheless, beyond the complexity and the richness of suggestion,
seduces by way of the originality of its images, with its humour, its
nonconformity with nothing gratuitous about it, its capacity to give voice and
body to personal experiences and those of a generation. An unusual book that,
barely a few pages in, defends itself on its own, without any need of its
presenter’s clumsy babbling. - J.A Masoliver Ródenas
Borgesland: An Interview With Susana Medina
“What has interested me most is that with the Internet people have access to one’s work immediately, I love the immediacy of it. On the other hand, I can put work in English, Spanish, essays, etc. If I publish in England, I can’t publish work in Spanish, if I publish in Spain I can’t publish work in English. I can share a world that would not fit in a conventional publication. Also, digital printing can help artistic independence because it makes it flexible and it lowers the price of production.”
By Ruben H and Monica Bergos
3:AM: In the poem ‘To Return to Iceland’ in Souvenirs from the Accident (2004), the reader can make out your intimate relation with Jorge Luis Borges, the author with whom, in a way, you have shared the last few years during the elaboration of your doctoral thesis.
SM: There is this poem where Borges said: ‘I did not know how to be happy’. Borges speaks about his life and in particular, his emotional life. His emotional life was disastrous. I read this poem when I was quite young. It led me to a rather early choice. To say, well, on the one hand there is writing, and on the other, there is life. And I want to live! Nevertheless life itself has somehow led me to reconcile myself with that imaginary world in which Borges took refuge, an imaginary world that transcends and transforms reality. ‘Blindness is not darkness, but another form of solitude’ said Borges. I believe that Borges, with whose work I have indeed shared a few years of my life, did not find happiness in his relationships with the opposite sex, although he absolutely found literary happiness. That type of happiness exists. It is something rather personal, but I suppose that I wrote that poem when I became profoundly deaf after an illness that lasted three years, during which I didn’t know what was going to happen. ‘To Return to Iceland’ arose from that experience.
3:AM: To return to Souvenirs from the Accident, in ‘Poem 66′, a horrifying and historical poem that transports us to that rancid atmosphere of Franco’s Spain, you speak of a Spanish Lolita that commits suicide?
SM: Lolita commits suicide, yes. Here we bring in the subject of ‘political correctness’. From a ‘politically correct’ feminist point of view, Lolita would be read as woman battered by circumstances who hasn’t been strong enough to survive. But that’s life. Suddenly someone can’t bear things any more and commits suicide. Is that politically correct? The case is that it happens.
3:AM: On some occasions, you have talked about writing as ‘an energy, as pulse, as rebellion’. What do you mean by this?
SM: Not necessarily rebellion in the political sense. A literary work might produce an effect that has to do with magic, with something that communicates forms that are not completely conscious. Like music, in a way. How is music translated? Can you speak about sociological music? That’s why I mentioned writing as pulse, that is to say, words can produce pleasure in an almost bodily way and this is an aesthetic pleasure that has to do with sound, with images, with how writing flows. I believe that energy in itself can be rebellious in the sense that there are types of energy that are not promoted. For example, formal experiments. As a young reader, when I read I never asked myself whether my favourite writers sold a lot of books or not. In his time, Borges hardly sold any books and later on an entire industry has been built around Borges. These are paradoxes of the market. It all echoes a brutal mercantile system.
3:AM: That ‘brutal system’ of the market of which you speak, does it evolve nowadays positively or negatively?
SM: It’s a rather complex subject. With the appearance of the Internet the truth is that I am very excited. Because people can put there whatever they want, so a very different hierarchy is created from the one concocted by the mass media or the mammoth publishing groups.
3:AM: Then, you feel comfortable in cyberspace?
SM: Yes, absolutely! What has interested me most is that with the Internet people have access to one’s work immediately, I love the immediacy of it. On the other hand, I can put work in English, Spanish, essays, etc. If I publish in England, I can’t publish work in Spanish, if I publish in Spain I can’t publish work in English. I can share a world that would not fit in a conventional publication. Also, digital printing can help artistic independence because it makes it flexible and it lowers the price of production. In this respect, I am thinking of re-editing Red Tales in digital printing.
3:AM: The subject of language often appears in conferences and interviews by Susana Medina.
SM: For me, living here, in England and writing for so long in Spanish has been problematic, since many people I knew simply could not read my work. And the Spanish people I used to know, didn’t read all that much, whilst English people who read, could only read in their own language. Now that has changed. To start writing in English has helped me to be in touch with people who are here and can read me in English.
3:AM: It could be said that transgression is very present in your work. How has your literary trajectory evolved around that concept?
SM: Well, I began in a rather transgressive way, because what interested me was a series of things that could not be said, could not be done, that don’t come out for economic reasons. Mainly I was interested in how they are said. Why can I not use this form, and why can I not experiment at a formal level if I want to? That phase appears in Chunks of One, Red Tales, Souvenirs of the Accident and Philosophical Toys and it is a way of saying what isn’t normally said.
3:AM: Let’s speak about your current projects. Slumberville is a novel that you have been writing for a long time and it seems that you want to continue with it.
SM: Slumberville is about dreams. It is most challenging to write about dreams, they are highly private affairs and they are ungraspable. I have transformed this into a kind of town or geographic zone. Dreams interest me very much, since they can even challenge your daily integrity. Actually Slumberville is written in Spanish although the title is in English. It’s forever unfinished. I have spent many years changing it, introducing modifications and I love it because it has rather amusing bits, rather strange, that I’d like to keep.
3:AM: This aspect of dreams, connects in a way with surrealism and the surrealism of Bunuel, another one of your artistic references.
SM: The surrealist movement is a movement circumscribed to a certain time and it doesn’t have the monopoly on dreams or irrational reality, which have always existed, before and after surrealism. What interests me in Bunuel is that he explores a series of themes that are not usually explored, or were not explored at his time. I have worked on the examples of fetishism in Bunuel. In a way, Philosophical Toys has a connection to this. It deals with our strange relation with objects. We like them but simultaneously we are critical of them. Humans create objects, therefore objects frequently have a strong human component. For example, that clock (she points at an old clock embedded in a box with two half-open doors, which is in a shelf next to where we are speaking), that clock is caught in a box as if on the verge of coming out, but it doesn’t come out because it’s trapped. It freezes an instant, because a second later it could be coming out… it’s like an egg about to hatch (…) My generation has a weakness for toys, for tiny things. I have many friends who buy toys for themselves and are forty years old. This generates in me an ambivalent reaction: on the one hand, I think that it’s positive to keep childhood within oneself and not to become too serious, something that seems sad to me… I believe that it’s important to keep a relationship with your inner fool, with childishness, with something pure. On the other hand, consumerism exploits this weakness. You might think that to be puerile is something subversive, but at the same time consumerism even encourages a type of infantile mentality. In short, you think that you have decided freely, that you want to be puerile so that a part of you doesn’t die, but those that sell products have decided that they are going to promote that attitude, precisely because thanks to you and others who have made that ‘subversive’ decision, a range of products now sells… (laughter).
On the Museum of Optography, Derek Ogbourne
Hallucinating spaces, or the Aleph
Borgesland's contents
Exploded Sheep or the Senselessness of War
Creation, tradition and something extra
Will the 21st century start, please? … Musings on being a judge for Women’s Erotic Art Competition … run by Jo Wonder
Poemas humanos: dystopia, utopia and the pulverised body
Un chien andalou or mind the gaps
An altar to Artaud
Adepts, magicians, tourists of the sublime and not really
ana: towards a polymorphous confession
A Dystopian Colombia
Buñuel´s Philosophical Toys (Script for 24 min film)
Physical Matters, on Derek Ogbourne, Gymnasion
A quizzical maze of erudite laughter
Is mistranslation possible? Translation requires
intent to achieve fidelity to an original. If a translator intends to
mistranslate in order to achieve fidelity to an original, albeit by other means,
then it seems to fulfill the requirement of translation. Mistranslation is
therefore translation by other means. If it doesn’t attempt to achieve fidelity
then it doesn’t seem to even intend to be a translation. It therefore is no
mistranslation. A failed translation may intend to achieve fidelity but by
failing is not a kind of translation but an absence of translation. It is
comparable to failures in other objects where, for example, I say a failed poem
is not a bad poem but no poem at all. A failed poem is, at best, merely
verse.
Medina and Ogbourne’s project is considered in the light of this
peculiar ontology. So the mysteriousness of Medina and Ogbourne’s collaboration
twitches a half-life likeness, inheriting its form from the uncanny dolls of Bellmer. It operates
between the unacceptable options open for the possibility of the very existence
of mistranslation. Rilke’s dolls fetishised
lifelessness as death to prove a distinction: ‘We pulled our dolls along behind
the bars of our crib, dragged them into the heavy folds of illness. They
appeared in dreams and were tied up in the disasters of feverish nights. They
did not make any effort of their own; they were lying at the edge of childhood
sleep, maybe filled with rudimentary thoughts of falling off, and they let
themselves be dreamed. Just as they were accustomed to be lived tirelessly
through someone else’s power during the day’. This is the atmosphere of Portishead’s wooden-hearted doll music ‘Nobody loves me’ and
‘Only You’ gurning as a soundtrack to Carlos Nine’s ‘Coloured Relief 2‘ picture
reinterpreted by American artist Anna Gaskell, animated by Svankmajer. Its popular contemporary
form is found in the monstrous ruins of dead girls in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Dark Water. Its trash
form are the lifeless repeating gestures of commonplace porn and strip-show
performances.
Medina/Ogbourne can also
be fused with Oshii Mamoru, creator of
the animation classic Ghost in the Shell 2, who
writes:’There are no human beings in Ghost in the Shell 2:
Innocence. The characters are all human-shaped dolls’. Here the German
unheimlich is mistranslated to bukimina in Japanese and to uncanny in English. The
obsession is for ningyo, which means ‘human shaped
figure’. Dolls, puppets, automata, androids and cyborgs are ningyo. Hartmann Schedel made a
woodcut of a ningyo with his ‘Blemmyae’ in Liber chronicarum
(Die Schedelsche Weltchronik), Das Buch der Croniken
und Geschiten von Hartmann Schedel in 1493. The form is human except that
there is no head and the face is in the chest. The ability of these figures to
speak not only to the horrific, but also the sublime, is captured in the last
lines of Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty character. The
powerful existential android in the Ridley Scott Bladerunner film contemplates his own death and as such
seems to transcend his machine limits; ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t
believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams
glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in
time… like tears in rain… Time to die.’
Medina opens chapter one
of her novel Philosophical
Toys, ‘The sex-appeal of the inorganic’, with the lines; ‘Nina, my name is
Nina, the same as my mother. It comes from the Italian, from ‘Antonina’, but in
Catalan ‘nina’ means ‘doll’. But it is not only my name. I talk of small things
because they have been a recurrent cipher at the centre of my life. Also, those
years, the years I am writing about, toys had become ubiquitous, my friends kept
giving me small toys as presents, kitsch gadgets, playful objects, I gave them
similar trinkets and then I felt, I started to sense, that these trashy toys
were relevant players in the hypnotic ritual of post-industrial life.’ It
reminds me of Hans Bellmer writing in ‘Memories of
the Doll Theme’ where he links the construction of the doll with sadistic
fantasies of assaults on the body and the powers of ‘pulp writers, magicians and
confectioners’.
It also is linked in Bellmer with a belief in the
supernatural powers of prayer, mistranslated here as a similar kind of hypnotic
ritual of post-industrial life. Bellmer’s pilgrimage to Colmar to the altarpiece
for the contemplation of diseased patients at the Hospital Order of St Anthony
in the company of his sick wife was not a matter of aesthetics but resistance to
Nazi oppression using techniques of better magic and a mystic uncanny that lay
out of reach of political fascists.
Medina’s parents fetishised the shoe. Freud explains
the general phenomenon in his 1927 essay on the subject. He thinks the foot or
shoe ‘owes its attraction as a fetish… to the circumstances that the inquisitive
boy used to peer up the woman’s legs towards her genitals …’ and ‘… the
underlinen so often adapted as a fetish reproduces the scene of undressing, the
last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic’. Bellmer’s
1934 Die Puppe ‘… presents the doll’s detached legs,
nestled in a white eyelet undergarment from which a rose emerges. Beneath the
flower, as if in a defensive response to what it symbolizes (the female
genitals), Bellmer has positioned a woman’s high-heel shoe, with the rigid heel
protruding outward toward the viewer’ according to Sue
Taylor. Taylor sees the Bellmer doll as instantiating the Freudian
thesis.
Medina takes to this scene in the mode of Angela Carter
and all those fantastic girls dallying in their bloody chambers. She finds her
pleasures in the fascination of ‘… traumas, pathologies, compulsions, the
blurring of boundaries, negative pleasures. We explored these in our lives, in
our work. Repetition, desire, destruction, that’s what we were into,
disagreeable objects, the beauty of the abject, transmuting shit into gold.’ The
trim metaphysical gestures and summarised plots contained in Medina’s work
re-render the marvelousness of fairy stories. It is an act of rehabilitation of
wonder from childhood, a girl’s eye view that takes pleasure and power from
these objects and memories from the past. The luminescent Marina
Warner would feel most at home here.
The film Leather Bound Stories
mistranslates this earlier novel of hers. Her ouevre in turn mistranslates that
of Borges. It is Borges’s notion of
mistranslation at work throughout, which involves the strangeness of mirroring,
dopplegängers, zombies and replicants. In the essay ‘About William Beckford’s
Vathek’, Borges says; ‘the original is unfaithful to the translation’. The
double is prototypically uncanny, as in Dostoevsky’s The
Idiot, as in Gogol and in Poe. Borges’s Ficciones place the uncanniness of mistranslation at the
heart of his aesthetic discoveries. So Medina displaces Borges as Borges once
displaced Joyce.
She errs to conjoin with Borges’s lineage, one that
strays and meanders through mistranslations of Argentine history identified by
Sergio Waisman in ‘Jorge Luis Borges’s Partial Argentine Ulysses; A Foundational (Mis-) Translation’ as ‘other texts
and declarations by the Literary Salon of 1837; the avant-garde projects of
journals like Proa and Martín Fierro’s Sur and Victoria Ocampo’s cultural importation machine; the
moment of the translation of Ferdydurke by Gombrowicz in
Buenos Aires (from Polish through French into an Argentine Spanish with multiple
collaborators in 1947); perhaps the whole of Borges’s œuvre, as well as much of
Julio Cortázar’s and Manuel Puig’s; and, if we jump to contemporary fiction, the
machine at the center of Ricardo Piglia’s 1992 novel The
Absent City, or the importance of translation in issues of identity and
sexuality in Sylvia Molloy’s latest novel, El común
olvido (2002).’
The childhood memory becomes a version of the
infinite library, a defence of plagiarism, a recognition of her own precursors
and the reflexive jewel of an intricate life. She displays a panoptican view
that fetishises the fetish of parents. She conjoins with another riddling
fetishist, Buñuel, playing with ‘…
the music box from The Criminal life of Archibaldo de la
Cruz, the wedding dress in Viridiana, the
female heads of hair nailed to a cross in L’Age d’or’
and the shoe fetishist in Diary of a Chambermaid.
‘Playing’ suggests the make-believe element of the work but also signals its
slightly suggestive threat, where playing becomes toying. Sinister inequalities
of power also swirl into the mix, in the form of the corrosive sexuality of the
too young for the too old.
The link between reading and erotic fetish is made
explicit when she writes in her essay ‘Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys’ about
Montiel; ‘The old man in the film, old Montiel, “old boots and shoes” is the
nickname his neighbour gives him, is, according to his daughter, a man of
refinement. He calls all his chambermaids “Marie”, regardless of their names, as
if all of them were interchangeable, all the same. He asks the chambermaid to
read a passage from Against Nature by Huysmans,
a bit where the whole of society is condemned. The chambermaid reads. He enjoys
her voice. She reads beautifully. He enjoys that. The beauty of a voice, as if
her voice was detached from her body. He then makes her try a pair of old boots,
fondles them, fondles her leg, makes her walk.’ This is further elaborated to
link the sexual fetish of shoes to reading on through finally to death where ‘he
dies hugging the little boots’.
Fetish-death as separation is discussed as the theme
of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz of 1955
which features a ‘memory where death, the erotic, separation and magical
omnipotence are inextricably linked’. The film features Lavinia and her sister,
‘her inanimate double, a mannequin … an exquisite corpse in the surrealist
game’. Medina rereads the foot fetish from her own female perspective, so the
game becomes the ‘denial of death, the ritual of sense, the overwhelming
importance of female masquerade, the fetish as intimately related to class
distinction through the power of culture to transcend natural reality’.
Medina and Ogbourne’s film suspends objects before us
that work as stories in themselves. In this, we are confronted with a new
species of fetish. A meta-fetish is a fetish of a fetish. The sophisticated
narrative that spookily winds together the images duplicates the object’s
stories. What is suggested is a perfect match. The strangeness of the film
becomes an effect of this indiscernibility of object and narration. The voice
acts like a shadow of the objects, a strange one that is an exact fit, which
covers the objects in a perfect match. The voice makes the objects disappear.
The meta-fetish cancels the original fetish. And we recall, a shadow is an
absence caused by an object blocking the light source.
Medina parks her shadow-narrative as a means of
making the objects disappear. There is no room for the objects. Yet the objects
take up the whole space. The perversity of the film is that in obliterating
sight of the objects we wonder what space is left for the voice. If the match is
exact then not only the objects become squeezed out of view. There is no room
either for the voice. Just as a shadow cannot exist within a solid object, nor
can the narrative survive within its objects. This reminds us of Beckett’s
struggle with minimal visibles, the attempt to write through to the other side
of language by reducing objects to the minimum requirement for representation,
as if maybe from three objects we can subtract to two, to one and then
unproblematically to zero. Beckett’s failure to reach zero points to a
constraint lurking in the background. Perhaps the mathematical operation
‘subtract one’ finds its limit of application as it approaches the metaphysics
of an empty universe.
Is the film what is left after the occlusion of both
narrative and object? Are we watching and listening to the film as an
abstraction of a film, just as someone might stare at the place where the
equator is, a logical limit between hemispheres that can only be an abstraction.
Medina is an expert in the art of such impossible limits. She knows it is
impossible to see an abstraction, for what would cause the eye to see?
‘Abstracts,’ as the philosopher Roy Sorenson reminds us, ‘ cannot sustain the
causal relations needed for visibility’.
The narrative takes up all the space of the
fetishised objects in the film. There is only room for an abstract layer
shimmering weirdly between the two. That can’t be what we are seeing. We ask
what is it, this strangely compelling film? It strikes us as being similar to an
abstract. But it is no covering that reveals what lies beneath. It is abstract
and so there is no functional dependence on whatever lies beneath.
There is a temptation to think that perhaps we ‘fill
in’ for what is being hidden, but this would mean that what we see is caused by
what would have caused us to see the stories or the objects. But fifteen years
ago the philosopher McLaughlin rightly pointed out that ‘we do not actually see
an object by virtue of the fact that it would cause us to have the same type of
experience’.
Medina is fascinated by memory. Perhaps then the film
is an act of memory. What we see is what we think lies hidden in its occluded
objects and narratives, which would suggest that we are drawing on memory of
having seen the objects once, free of the narrative. But someone without
memories of the objects would still see the film. So seeing the film can’t be so
reliant on these memories. Many who have seen the trailer for the film will not
necessarily have read Medina’s Borgean novel on which the film is based, and yet
they see it just as they see other films.
What is hidden in the objects, the narrative and the
film? Even if hidden, we are tempted to say we know what lies inside the film,
but we just can’t see it. The idea of something being contained inside an object
that exactly resembles what lies within it reminds us of a Russian Doll
scenario. But the abstract surface means that, unlike a Russian Doll, there is
nothing on the outside for us to see. The analogy breaks down.
Perhaps the film works like an after-image caused by
a camera flash. Austen Clarke writes about how such flashes disable the eye,
where photons bleach out photopigments and cause a temporary blindness.
Similarly, where the optic nerve connects to the retina there is perpetual
blindness. The reason we don’t see a perpetual blindspot is that the brain
actively fills it in on the basis of its surroundings. Is the film then a kind
of blindness that is filled in by the activity of our automatic gestalt
imagination, the very mechanism that allows us to see any series of still images
as a movie? There seems too much similarity between seeing an ordinary film and
seeing this one. One feature that makes the active filling-in blindspot theory
seem suspect is that the film is public. Our blindspots are subjective, private,
interior events.
Ogbourne works to create doubt about this. He
bombards us with data that destabilizes our beliefs about what is public and
what is private. He presents us with a museum of optography, images held in the
retina at the moment of death. The project is both a conjurer’s trick and
investigation, a unanimous ghost story and Gestalt testing room. A whole
encyclopedia and exhibition of this phenomenon creates doubt even though we
don’t believe our own eyes when looking at them. It is possible to stop someone
knowing by presenting them with things they believe are false. Disbelief can
erase knowledge if knowledge isn’t analysed in terms of belief. In a flood of
falsehood the knower is inclined to start doubting the facts she once knew.
Confidence eroded, she falls back into a suspended state of true belief that
isn’t knowledge any more.
Ogbourne’s hoax plays a serious game and dismantles
the easy confidence of his targeted scientific discourse. The unease his work
creates embarrasses science. He emphasises the surrealist imagination that
placed the eye at its sacrilegious, scandalous heart. He disturbs lineages by
showing how the photographic investigations of pioneers like Muybridge
with his running horses and wrestling nudes collude with those of artists such
as Max Ernst and Bataille. He works to
manage a haunted space; 145 retinal drawings, historical drawings of eye
diseases, the taped voice of German optographist Alexandridis discussing what
optograms are with Salvador Dali, the weird documentary Medina describes as a
surrealist ‘quest to uncover the truth and constant fascination behind the myth
of optography, beginning with the seventeenth century, when a Jesuit astronomer
called Christopher Schiener observed an image laid bare on the retina of a frog.
It then travels to the town of Heidelberg (a recurrent topos for optography)
where Wilhelm Kühne made the first and most successful visually identifiable
optograms recorded as drawings in the late 1870s and also obtained the only
known human optogram from a condemned young man who had killed his two children,
Edhard Reif. We learn that the arbitrary shape that looms large at the entrance
of the Museum
of Optography is presumably the last thing Edhard Reif saw as he was
beheaded. In the documentary, this human optogram spins, pulsates and flashes on
the screen creating afterimages and reminding us that the last thing we might
see could be a meaningless abstraction that leaves us in suspense for eternity.
An interview with Dr. Alexandridis, who made a series of optograms in 1975 for
the German police, tells us about the process of obtaining retinal images. The
documentary ends with a life-affirming sequence, as a couple of rabbits hop
around a landscape covered in snow’. If Ogbourne’s film works on Medina, here
Medina reverses the pattern. Neither tames the other so the collaboration is
fertile in both directions, a marriage of merging weirds.
Unlike Borges, Joyce and Milton, the three blind
giants of literature, there is nothing wrong with our eyes. The mystery of the
Ogbourne/Medina film survives knowing how it has been constructed. But this
leads to a further suspicion. Perhaps then the whole mystery is bogus, another
of Ogbourne’s tricks. The solution to the mystery is that there is no mystery.
There is no ghost. But the attempt to understand the mysteriousness can’t be
dissolved through identifying some self-referencing absence. This is genuine
ghost terrain, more Susan Hill’s ‘Woman in Black’ than Wilkie Collins’s ‘Woman
in White’.
By denying that there is any space between the
objects in the film and the narrative, we have described the edge in between as
being an abstract. But perhaps the analogy with shadows requires that the
penumbra of shadows be factored into the described scenario. A penumbra of a
shadow is light pollution at the edge of a shadow. A shadow is strictly the
exclusion of all light, the umbra, but perhaps we need an expansionist reading
of shadow to include the penumbra within the scope of what we mean by
shadow.
But there is no room for anything analogous to a
penumbra. The objects and the narrative are an exact match. The meta-fetish is
perfect. Medina/Ogbourne have suspended us between unacceptable alternatives.
The strangeness is the beauty of the calibration. And there is unutterable
strangeness in both her novel and in the film.
The strangeness is unappreciated if wrong inferences
are drawn. There are parallels when discussing hearing silence or seeing
darkness. When Fred Dretske says that
people can ‘non-epistemically’ hear silence or see darkness he is claiming that
we can believe without believing what is being perceived. But when we hear
silence or see darkness we don’t rely on reflective awareness on silence or
darkness. Roy Sorensen points out that turning off a radio can be enough to wake
us from a dreamless sleep and this requires no reflective awareness. We
unreflectively hear silence.
Someone accepting Dretske’s argument would miss the
eeriness of the Medina/Ogbourne film. The film dedicates itself to energies that
exist beyond physical attributes. Wittgenstein pointed out that we don’t need
eyes or ears to see or hear. We can introspect our sensations. In sleep we may
detect absence of sensation. Austen Clarke wrote his ‘Theory of Sentience’ to
point out that when we no longer perceive we introspect to detect absence. For
how else could absence of perception be detected if a person is
senseless?
Medina’s film might report experience without
sensation. This would allow the possibility of knowing what death is like. Is
the film Parmenidean, working its weird beauty as a way of understanding sleep
as a brother of death? ‘For according as the hot or the cold predominates, the
understanding varies, that being better and purer which derives from the hot . .
. . But that he [Parmenides] also attributes sensation to the opposite element
in its own right is clear from his saying that a dead man will not perceive
light and heat and sound because of the loss of fire, but that he will perceive
cold and silence and the other opposites. And in general, all being has some
share of thought.’ (Theophrastus De Sensu 3-4,
Robinson 1968, 124)
But this is not right. The dead experience nothing.
And perception of darkness, silence, cold and so forth are perceptions of
absence, not perceptions of what is. As Sorensen makes clear, ‘absences are not
at the low end of a hierarchy of being’. But silence is a most negative
sensation. Nothing is sensed and no sensation represents the absence,
contrasting it with pitch blackness where, although nothing is sensed there is a
sensation of the absence taking the form of a colour, black.
Medina’s objects are quintessences of brevity — to
the point of hovering between unacceptable options — and the film’s condensing
and squeezing gives the Borgean idea of narrative another daring twist. Borges
defined his writing as a project working out a relationship to Joyce’s Ulysses. In the preface to his first collection of short
stories ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ he writes, ‘It is a laborious madness and
an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five
hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The
better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and
offer a summary, a commentary on them’.
Borges wrote in a press article of 1941 about a short
story not quite completed when he published that first collection. This story,
‘Funes, His memory’, is about a man whose mind is incapable of forgetting things
and so is stuffed full of irrelevant details such as the shape of clouds at
sunrise on April 30, 1882. Borges concludes that Funes is a monster and that “a
consecutive straightforward reading of the four hundred thousand words of Ulysses would require similar monsters”. In 1925 Borges was
the first South American to translate Ulysses. He
only did the last page. He always said that he never actually read Ulysses. His fictions about imaginary novels that contained
all stories in them are characterised by Andres Perez Simon as a brilliant
process that organised a mythical translation to a polemical defence of
censorship. Andres Perez Simon suggests it all wound out of Borges’s reflections
on Ulysses. The great novel of the plenum, the novel
of everything, including all stories and the whole universe, but contained in a
single day, a single city, is the Aleph of literature that transfixed and
galvanized Borges’s writing.
Borges’s fiction of the ‘Aleph’ is an account of an
object that like the Joycean novel offers perception of the plenum, as well as
expanding and reforming English. The translator of Joyce is charged with a
similar duty by Borges. So we read Borges commenting on a particular translation
and translator’s efforts; ‘The aim of this note is not to accuse Mr. Salas
Subirat of incapacity…but to denounce the incapacity, for certain ends, of all
Neo-Latin languages, and especially, of Spanish. Joyce expands and reforms the
English language; his translator has the duty of taking similar licences’.
Beatriz Sarlo thought, in 1999, that ‘Borges’s translation of the last pages of
Molly Bloom’s monologue is, without doubt, the best translation of Joyce ever
achieved in Spanish’. Borges delighted in the ‘delicate music’ of Ulysses, comparing it as being in places equal to
Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne.
Medina takes notice of this delicacy and the
requirement to temper her energies in accordance with Borgean stylistic
felicity. The film’s phantasmagoria is intense with light impossibility. It
works as an abbreviated note presenting a picture that includes all and every
picture that doesn’t picture itself. In this lies the dark madness of ‘The
Aleph’ and Ulysses where it is claimed everything can
be depicted. There never can be a picture that depicts all and only those
pictures that don’t depict themselves. Ulysses and
‘The Aleph’ are self-contradictory objects.
Unless a dialetheistician, and therefore Australian,
we don’t think contradictions can exist. Unless we are paraconsistent logicians
(again making us more than likely Australian) we also think they are false.
Borges’s intriguing paradoxical fictions inseminate this idea by asking us to
believe in the Aleph. David Hume thought it impossible to believe in the
possibility of a mountain without a valley. He thought the difficulty of a
completely different nature to believing in unicorns. Borges imagines the Coin
of Odin as a coin with only one side to challenge Hume.
The Australian dialetheist and paraconsistent
philosopher Graham Priest believes in the existence of contradictions and wrote
a story called ‘Sylvan’s Box’ about an empty box with something in it. He
intends this to be read as a straight contradiction. Like Borges he writes
convincingly of the possibility of characters believing in such an inconsistent
object. The fact that we can believe in characters believing an inconsistent
object existing is enough to show that we can believe in
inconsistencies.
Medina likens this to a kind of hallucinating.
Sorensen thinks it is a commonplace because he thinks it is a natural feature of
thinking. He thinks everybody believes contradictory beliefs. Haskell Fain and
A.Phillips Griffiths are gullibilists who think ‘There is no proposition so
transparent in its falsehood that all of mankind could see through it. There is
no proposition so compactly true that no one could miss it. The most trivial of
tautologies can be believed false; the most blatant of contradictions can be
believed true. Even the most venerable proposition ‘I exist’ — which, Descartes
claimed is ‘necessarily true each time I pronounce it, or that I mentally
conceive it — can be falsely believed to be false. For what is to prevent some
lunatic from believing that he does not exist’.
The strange wonder of the work infiltrates classical
logic but for it to maintain its strangeness it mustn’t replace it. The effect
requires the tension. There is a history to classical logic. It was invented in
the early twentieth century and tends to be thought of as the only game in town.
It is therefore what deviant logics tend to oppose. As pointed out, deviant
logic has found fertile ground in Australia, being labeled humorously ‘wallaby
logic’. Mainland Europe and Critical Theory departments everywhere have variants
of Hegelianism and Marxism as their favoured brand of deviation. Even in the UK
Michael Dummett has been a giant figure arguing for deviance in terms of
Intuitionism. In the USA the pervasive influence of Quine is cited as a reason
for the difficulty of getting deviant logic off the ground there. What is the
big issue? Classic logic is committed to contradictions implying that everything
follows. A contradiction is an explosion into triviality.
The paraconsistent logician denies the conclusion.
She thinks that it is possible to have a proposition that is both true and
false. A dialetheist is an extreme paraconsistent logician and thinks that true
contradictions exist. They have examples to suggest why they are right. They
claim that Calculus theories of Leibniz and Newton initially involved
contradictory theories about infinitesimals. The solution was to just assume
that infintesimal values were zero at some point and not at others. The
explosion to triviality need not happen. The literary fictions of Beckett may be explorations of
this embedded contradiction.
Borges enjoys the paradox of self-reference and
Cantor’s exploration of the infinite as helpful ways of understanding the power
of literature. Zeno and Kafka are bedfellows. A dialetheistic approach allows
for semantic overexpressiveness. The self-referencing liar paradox confronts
someone asserting: ‘I am lying’. Graham Priest thinks truths are in the world
rather than in semantic theory and that the world can make the assertion true,
even though contradictory. He wrote the short story “Sylvan’s Box’ in memory of
the paraconsistent philosopher Richard Sylvan who died in Canberra. It was a
story that was to help him get his head round inconsistent reality. Yet I think
the strangeness of such metafiction is lost if the classical reflex isn’t set up
first. I tend to think without the tension in the conflict the strangeness is
tamed and the weird becomes domesticated. I tend to think the Hegelians have
somewhat done this, and Theorists too. They don’t seem shocked, moved or awed by
the weirdness coming through. Me, I’m like a kid in the Wonka factory with this
stuff, and I think Medina and Ogbourne are too, just staggering around in a
daze.
Medina’s work may be understood in terms of Borges’s
condensed theory of originality and translation found in his essay ‘The Homeric
Versions’ where he writes: ‘To assume that every recombination of elements is
necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is
necessarily inferior to draft H — for there can only be drafts. The concept of
the “definitive text” corresponds only to religion or exhaustion’. For Borges,
and on my reading, for Medina/Ogbourne also, there is no definitive text, merely
drafts.
There is flexibility in this stance, however. Borges
also wrote; ‘I only know that any modification would be sacrilegious and that I
cannot conceive of any other beginning for the Quixote. . . . The Quixote, due
to my congenital practice of Spanish, is a uniform monument, with no other
variations except those provided by the publisher, the bookbinder, and the
typesetter’. Here, he seems rather insistent on taking the Cervantes text as a
final version. His story ‘Pierre Menard’ suggests he treated the text as a
sacred text.
As an aside, I note that in the new paperback of
Borges, On Writing, edited by Suzanne Jill Levine et
al, which offers, according to Martin Schifino’s recent review in the TLS, ‘ten new translations and represents twenty-eight
pieces from Weinberger’s selection’ we find that ‘the first sentence of Don Quijote is misquoted in an essay that starts with a
word-by-word analysis of that sentence’. Is Schifino right to accuse the
copyeditor of failure rather than acknowledge a surprising version of Borges’s
theory of mistranslation at work?
Ogbourne and Medina’s wonderfully delicate but zesty
film is a Borgean cabinet of wonders that seems to work like Ricardo Piglia’s
translation machine in his The Absent City novel we
mentioned in passing earlier ,where: ‘At first they had tried to make a machine
that could translate texts. [...] One afternoon they fed it Poe’s ‘William
Wilson’ and asked it to translate it. Three hours later the teletype began to
print the final version. The story was stretched out and modified to such a
degree that it was unrecognizable. It was now called ‘Stephen Stevenson’. That
was the first story. [...] We had wanted a machine that could translate; we got
a machine that transforms stories. [...] It takes what is available and
transforms what appears to be lost into something else. That is life’.
Magic. - Richard Marshall
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.