In Translation

A new series of posts in which I use art to inspire flash fiction

From the albums of writer Virginia Woolf, an avid photographer (is it any surprise?)

All writing is an act of translation. Sensations alight in the mind — warmth, green in the wisteria leaves through the window, an afternoon tiredness, the pale blue of the wall — and the faculty of language, via the writing hand, gives them expression through strings of letters arranged in a row.

As an undergrad, the central question of my thesis (or bachelor’s essay as it was called) was what it could like to translate the subterranean prose of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf into a feature film. It was a futile endeavor in retrospect (then again, as I remember thinking at the time, this is not a bad time to be impractical). Still I look back with fondness at all the books I read and the paintings and photographs I looked at and films I watched, the dreams I developed for my own hypothetical films. Twelve years later, I also appreciate the thinking I did on what it means to translate something from one “language” to another — a topic I’m considering again as I shift my practice not, as I was then, from writing to visual art, but from visual art to writing.

In “The Task of the Translator,” one of the texts I referenced in that essay, Walter Benjamin emphasizes the importance of allowing the form of the original, with the idiosyncrasies of its native tongue, to express itself in the translation.

As he puts it:

“The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own, he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language.”

This is what I’m interested in doing in my writing on visual art — to allow it to deepen and expand my own language. I have an idea for a series of posts in which I write flash fiction inspired by paintings, allowing the painter’s particular vision inform the narrative voice, tone, setting and sense of time. I see this as less an exercise in writing about art than writing with art, letting it inform the art I make with words.

I don’t have a good name for this series. So I’m just going to number them. I’ll keep it short. I’ll try for once a month. And I will post the first one next week.