Violins, violence, translation: looking outwards.

ABSTRACT

By taking contemporary art as a starting-point to define translation, we set off on a fascinating journey through disciplines which do not contradict each other but improve each other. Thus we can see, with this transversality among disciplines, that “each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way” (Hofstadter 2007, 252), that we are strange loops where everything is interrelated and this gives us “a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human” (ibid., 361). On this journey, our aim is to find out what translation does: and what it does is, or should be, reveal those invisible worlds lying behind texts; see what texts say without saying; show the walls others have built, walls which are sometimes obvious, but at other times show the most dangerous walls, those that are not visible. Translation should be able to resist essentialisms, binary oppositions and the stagnation of the universal. Translation as a way of giving the other back the right to look.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation studies
• outward turn
• post-structuralism
• contemporary art
• conceptual art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Another fundamental pillar supporting this hypothesis is Roland Barthes and his ‘referential illusion’ (1957, 1970/2005, 1972), as well as Foucault’s breakdown of mimetic theory (1966, 13–15). I would also like to mention that another revealing author in this regard is Jonathan Potter, who describes language as a construction yard in which the world is not categorised beforehand but constituted in one way or another as people talk about it (Potter 1996). How is reality really manufactured?, Potter asks. What is constructed? How is it constructed? Who constructs reality for us? With what means and strategies? And in the field of contemporary philosophy, perhaps those who have better dealt with this question are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Différence et répétition, where he proposes the inversion of Platonism and discusses the meaning of meaning. Following this same line of thought, an essay contained in Writing and Difference, Derrida claims that 'it is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic'(Derrida 1967/1978, 202). In our global (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009), brown (Rodríguez 2002), cosmopolitan (Bielsa 2016) world 'it is deferral what is at the beginning’ (Derrida 1967/1978, 202).

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Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte

Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte is Professor of Translationat the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include translation theory, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, contemporary art and gender studies. She has published a number of books, anthologies and essays (Meta, Perspectives, The Translator, European Journal of English Studies, Forum, Translaation and Interpreting Studies, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Terminology, etc.) on these issues, including Traducción, manipulación, desconstrucción (Salamanca, Ediciones Colegio de España, 1995), El futuro de la traducción (Valencia, Alfons el Magnànim, 1998), Translation/Power/Subversion (coedited with Román Álvarez, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,1996), En los límites de la traducción (Granada, Comares, 2006),Traducir entre culturas: diferencias, poderes, identidades(Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 2007), Traducción y asimetría (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), La traducción y los espacios: viajes, mapas, fronteras (Granada: Comares, 2013), ”Dile que le he escrito unblues”. Del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción (Frankfurt: Verveurt, 2017) and La traducción y la(s) historia(s) (Comares 2018). She is a practising translator specialized in the fields of philosophy, literature and contemporary art.