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This being the young person’s edition (kind of), all contributors at time of
publication are studying language in one form of another, and a number of
them actually know what they’re talking about, whether it’s Greek, Italian,
Old English or French. How that feeds into the conversation is another
matter- hopefully it will make itself known as the journal unfolds.
The idea and function of the 'theme' itself was more a guiding principle
than a set of strictures, and certainly wasn’t intended to be inhibitive in any
way. As a result the pieces here relate to the familiar (intimidating) act of
translation only partially: there are essays, poems and readings – and even
the odd drawing – dealing variously with the issue of language, but all were
born out of the same shared appreciation for the importance of words as a
means of communicating sense and meaning.
There are a number of silences too, cropping up here and there, speaking
to the importance of perhaps not quantifying everything all the time into
digestible verbal units. A number of conversations count among this
number, having been cut cruelly short by the due date— some were reined
in (but are included here nonetheless), some will be carried on outside of
the journal – either online or in the pub – and with any luck some will
attract new and interested parties keen to carry the baton further.
Needless to say (but worth saying anyway), all responses are constructive
responses, and are not intended to be taken as in any way malicious or
derisive (with the possible – probable – exception of Jaspreet’s).
Finally, thanks are due to all involved with this edition of the journal- to
Scott, for the opportunity, to the ‘silent technical wizards’ for bringing it to
our screens, and to the contributors, who deserve congratulations as well
as many thanks for living through the tyrannous reign of my editorship, rife
as it was with many changes of mood and mind.
Callum
This is a brief essay, cryptic perhaps, but necessary. Translation asks us the fundamental
question of understanding. What it means to know in a language, and what should make
another language unknowable. It formulates itself as a question between the present
and absent, between the intelligible and the unintelligible, the foreign and the familiar. Is
this divide - formulated as a binary structure between the text we read as translated and
the text we read ‘originally’ - one of metaphysical quality or conversely pure distance? Is
there some imponderable and irretrievable horizon that prevents the translation from
discovering the original, that prevents the sign system of another tongue from
discovering the meaning of the former, or is something else at stake?
One cannot help but be drawn to Benjamin and the Task of the Translator. That
hushed talk of the tertiary text – the unspoken reality that sits beneath - the original
shimmering intentionality that takes place and plays within that liminal plane between
language and infinity. Benjamin talks of this third text, the real text, that hovers,
promising truth to all authors, translators and readers. It is a penumbra that cannot be
touched; perhaps here we locate the point of deserverence where the fabled logos is
sacrificed into our fallen tongue and the object once realised in the divinatory fury of the
artist is stillborn into system. This meaning then was never clear, it never had the crystal
diaphanousness that gave us truth, a transparency in language. Every work crystallises in
the moment of conception. Every word once written is swept away by différance and left
fundamentally unknowable. Haven’t you heard that the author is dead? The author is left
in the instance of creation as a reader part of all three translative functions. The author
from nothingness to words, the reader from words to intelligibility, the translator from
words to words. Perhaps though there are only ever two plays of translation, the
translator himself is merely a reader, he acts as we all do for
These words are engraved upon the tablets and given form that strips the force of words
and leaves their bones to bleach upon the desert of reading. Derrida writes of this force
and knows that we are left with ghosts, “haunted”. The primal terrors of chaotic natural
thought are dispelled with inscription and brought to order; it is Adorno’s dear dialectic.
Every text is the translation of that primal silence that both comprehends and
obliterates the idea of negativity and positivity as the means to posit objects. It is the
nothingness of everything, the static crepitated hum of infinity that must be violently
pared back like the sculptor hacking away at marble till he is left with the great negativity
of formal creation.
Therefore in one very real sense the translation is no different to the original.
The dual transformations of the author and reader are merely mediated by a further
difference. The system of comprehension that may not carry adequacy of expression is a
risk we always took and always take. It is impossible to know, however, and this is the
great, silent fear of language. There can be no surety of realisation, as there exist no
means of conceptualisation in either tongue. This is the dizzying act of faith that exists at
the heart of every linguistic performance. The unease of translation is its importance: it is
gives reality to the sickness at the heart of words in the defamiliarized linguistic object.
The problem is not the interactivity of sign systems; it is how the silent, wordless
objects of thought are birthed into language. When placed in a structure of intelligibility
the overlaps become clearer, the lacunae become clearer. When one has sense of
inadequacy it allows knowledge to circumscribe an absence, give form, objectify, classify,
and in the sense of Foucault, have knowledge of. The unintelligible is disarmed in this
common translation between the signs, it is the great comfort of all knowledge without
self-conscious structures of signification; even the zones of doubt or aporetic uncertainty
can be mastered by the totalising hierarchy of words. It is that miraculous moment of
godlike force that remains foreign, the point at which the author and speaker and
conscious subject places thought into the system. The true translation is that moment of
silence before the birth of the universe. The meditation in some brief instance of calm, a
deep breath before the fury of the word. It is the transformation from silence to sound,
from infinity to the infinity of presence.
J.R.W.S
“One cannot help but be drawn to Benjamin and The Task of the Translator.” Well I
sure as fuck can. Benjamin was clearly a genius, otherwise he would not have been regarded
virtually as a prophet for his Arcades Project –– a set of half-assed notes for a book he couldn’t
“Haven’t you heard that the author is dead?” If only, so I could piss on the grave;
the tombstone no doubt says ‘DIFFÉRANCE’. Would that gobbledygook like this could be
killed so easily. Is ‘inscription’ really “the essence of suicide”? I thought killing yourself was,
and I might try again myself if I have to read any more of this pretentious drivel. Alas, when
I jumped off the bridge I was “caught by temporality” and indeed do “forever stumble after
the fact”, not only because he caught like a girl and broke my leg, but also since I lost the will
to walk properly (or live –– again) after a few minutes of “temporality’s” dreadful
conversation. He gave me herbal tea and vegan biscuits, and that won’t be the last time he
makes me throw up. His idiotic haircut and skinny jeans are bad enough.
This writer mentions “three dances across the face of infinity” –– why can none of
them dance off a cliff yet? “The author [dances] from nothingness to words”? Not in this
essay, where he limps from nothingness to balderdash with impressive speed for a
hobbledehoy (“temporality” caught him too apparently). Yet the essayist insists “we can
telescope this further”. If he telescopes any further up his own arsehole he’s liable to damage
his tonsils. Thank Heaven he quotes W. H. Auden: it’s such a relief to see something like
readable literature again, even if these seventeen syllables are merely another ingredient in this
dog’s breakfast. Shame he goes straight back to Derrida after that.
“The primal terrors of chaotic natural thought are dispelled with inscription and
brought to order; it is Adorno’s dear dialectic, translation is the first act of enlightenment.”
Not in this essay it isn’t. The primal terrors have been finger-painted into a brownish-purple
swirl and I don’t think it’s meant to represent the sun. Whatever it is, it’s not getting posted
on my fridge door anytime soon. Whoever said any of Adorno’s dialectics were ‘dear’?
Maybe to Adorno, or to anybody else who regards the composition of obfuscatory piffle as
an act of ‘enlightenment’. Frankly I’d rather read Rousseau, and I hate Rousseau.
“Every text is the translation of that primal silence that both comprehends and
obliterates the idea of negativity and positivity as the means to posit objects.” I don’t
comprehend this ‘thought’, and nor does the author, and I wish he’d obliterate it already.
That said, ‘negativity’ is a splendid ‘idea’ when you’re confronted with a mouthful of chewed-
up crayons like this. There is nothing wrong with using metaphor and simile as shorthand for
arguments that you’re too lazy to spell out in full, or as place-holders for ideas and concepts
that might otherwise be clumsily expressed if spun out. But what sort of psycho actually
Gadabout Press, October ed., 2013
believes in them, having made them up himself in the first place, and then tries to build a
teetering argument on them?
“It is the nothingness of everything, the static crepitated hum of infinity that must be
violently pared back like the sculptor hacking away at marble till he is left with the great
negativity of formal creation.” On the one hand the ‘nothingness of everything’ here may be
taken for granted (the honesty in bringing it up is admirable); but no jury in the land would
not convict you for insisting that some poor, poorly-thought-out sculptor “must be violently
pared back” for any reason when he’s only trying to do his job. The ‘static crepitated hum of
infinity’ sounds less like the Music of the Spheres than the last thing you want to hear in a
crowded lift on a hot day. Maybe all this is a demonstration of how you eventually get a job
in an English Faculty these days. Power to the people, then. In the meantime the reader of
this essay finds terms like ‘bidirectional metaphor’ and ‘equiprimordial’ flung in his face, by a
writer who talks of the ‘archaeology of translation’ (a term ripped off from some Frog)
despite evidently knowing nothing of sculpture, archaeology, translation, philosophy –– or
indeed literature. I doubt that anybody of sound formation with the slightest taste for books
or the faintest acquaintance with the achievements of English letters would dare be known in
public as the author of sentences as ugly as these, unless he hated himself bitterly, were very
perverse indeed, or else had the name J. H. Prynne (NB: ‘Rain Man’ with a lisp –– an old fool
alleged to be a poet by people who ought to know better).
There is no need to engage closely with the two concluding paragraphs of this piece.
It is discourteous to ignore them, but the writer has shown such ignorance of translation,
such ineptitude at literary-critical theorising and such absurd contempt for the reader that bad
manners are pardonable here, not least on the part of anybody who wishes seriously to
discuss a question and not have theory-polluted effluent spat into his eyes. Anyway the
conclusion has no point, only a lesson: never let your children read English at Cambridge.
Not if the Faculty of F. R. Leavis has deteriorated to the level of some third-rate Taliban-style
madrassah, indoctrinating its pimply, stoop-shouldered scholars with outdated pseudo-
revolutionary dogma of the variety that has wrecked universities all over the Continent and
beyond since 1968, leaving empty, ill-trained minds to be colonised in the millions by the
wisdom of such distinguished philosophers as Katy Perry, who required a mere two years to
create the lyrics for “California Girls” –– such a triumph of the artist’s craft that most
listeners fail to reflect on how if California girls do indeed ‘melt your popsicle’ then their all
efforts of energetic sluttiness must come to naught in the end, seeing as they can give no man
an erection after all. Let us thank Steve Jobs for helping to circulate such subtle, intricate
conundrums all over the civilized world, inescapably, and may he roast in Hell for eternity.
But this is the highest culture with which Cambridge English students are cultured, unless
they prefer the sort of ‘radical’ music that Bob Dylan long ago made available for sale in
Starbucks. Many of these students look like hippies and are undoubtedly fond of protest ––
so why have they not instigated an Occupation of the Faculty that wastes three years of their
lives exposing them to bollocks theory whilst teaching them nothing about English literature?
Or has nobody noticed what a malicious practical joke this education is? Can nobody in
Cambridge English speak plainly –– or think clearly?
Άδοξος, άθλιος,
καταραμένος απ’ τον Ονήσιλο.
By me – Onisilos,
extracted from History and Myth
fully living, fully alive
For ten years this Onisilos he’d mobilise and send his bees
to sting us
to wake us
to bring us a message
A device used by the translator which informs the reader of the historical
background is the repetitive and exaggerated use of "fullness":
We are told that Salamina could not stand the Persian rule, despite their
alliance with the Ionian Greeks,
Let us also consider the reverse psychology, which Onisilos had attempted
to work over his people,
to sting us
to wake us
to bring us a message
Onisilos might have done this in order to warn and prepare , "to wake us",
"to bring us a message", his people for a future battle by turning them
insensitive to physical pain "without us feeling a thing". Indeed, the reader
is told that this had lasted for ten years in the third verse, and in the fifth,
the brutes arrive at Salamina overcoming them. The lapse of time clearly
suggests Onisolos' ultimately good intentions, and his peoples'
misconception. The result of this appears to be not merely their conquest
but their "damnation" and "ingloriousness", because the king himself
metaphorically,
This might represent the stupidity of his people as his skull is being
shattered against their heads which hadn't been awakened, which King
Onisilos had failed in awakening "to wake us", before the arrival of the
brutes
Gadabout Press, October ed., 2013
Missed Au Revoir
To say "adieu"
knowing
this is what you meant
I thought "arrivederci",
never addio
too harsh, too easy
but this is what you meant
What I take from this piece is an in-your-face intensity. Its strength comes from the
breakdown of the speaking voice, which is at first serene, expository, and later becomes
extremely personal. The first two stanzas are personal, they tell a personal story, but it is
rooted in the universal. The really personal voice of the speaker comes in with the
obscure infinitive to say... to say adieu, and the language changes. So does the verse
form; the structure becomes more erratic with lines only one word long & any last scrap
of metrical consistency lost. Line endings, too, feel like they’re from a different poem.
But perhaps it is not so much more “personal” as it is more expressive. “Addio” tells us
of a consciousness surrounding the use of language: in real life you never say addio, you
say arrivederci. The speaker is exasperated, moving through tenses. The past is bitterly
marked by “never”, repeated words are ruined by the continuing knowledge of its
existence; the repetition of “too” is drawn out with annoyance and disbelief, and the
beginning of the next line even more so. And then
By this point I am convinced that I am not in a film, or a fairy tale, but in real life, the
same as in 1300, the final clinching line expressing the poet’s timeless anguish not just
with love but with language.
(I had no choice.)
A lost script,
I tried to translate you
Under a gaze as unfazed
As that of ancient runes.
It is unwise
To see waterfalls in eyes
Which hold only stained glass.
Reading your body across the room when you were a stranger was easy.
Now that I can quote you sleep talking
I don’t think I understand you at all.
But my aloneness is a revelation that strikes hot even now, more so now, when I am
forced to stop and think of nothing else, it seems that I can think of nothing else, in the
high summer heat when the world is dry, with no prospect of relief.
Music is dulled; I stand in one spot, never moving, neither forwards nor backwards nor
even looking round, for all my senses are dulled. The dull silence presses in on me, and I
am blind, or as if blind, I blink up at the heavy sky – so light! – floating in and out of this
hateful sight in my own dumb eyes, my own dumb mind, thinking of nothing else.
You, and time spent, together are a fraction. I remember days we spent climbing trees-
idly climbing and sitting in trees. Sat watching animals below, thinking how they bore no
grudge, and above all sensed what we could never sense—a kind of end coming.
But now I find myself regretting again time taken and wasted, and find myself recording
again in some way things which merit no recording, remembering the way things were
before the façade broke down.
Fragments of fanciful incantation: Words are blunt, elevating nothing they do nothing
but never cease, never stopping in their stubborn cycle, obscuring everything that in a
moment’s real pause is there to be discovered. I try to hear you speak, pushing closer
and closer until there’s nowhere else to go because I am in the same spot come full
circle, telling myself over and over things become clearer at the borders of things.
But I am some beast at the hands of myself, some other beast, constantly asking What
voice is this? Fallen prey to the natural cycle of things I cling to a dying hope that things
become clearer at the borders of things.
summer trembling
weak as last breaths
out of reach-
caught no more-
plunging forward
uncertainly:
synapsical lapse
in a darkling wood,
somehow hands
come together
till no more—
fallen but still stirring.
summer
weak as last breaths
out of reach-
no more-
forward
uncertainly:
synapsical lapse
in a darkling wood,
frozen but
somehow,
somehow hands
together
like leaves,
autumn air
till no more—
fallen but still.
Just from reading the above version of the poem, one may immediately question my
authority in deciding what a verb is. Have I truly understood how the poet is ‘verbifying’
his/her sentences? Have I given him/her the freedom to allow the words to take on their
own grammatical function? Of course, it appears as though I am instantly imposing my
own view on the poem. In other words, I am active. Using verbs, I am modifying the
poem, rendering it mobile. Even by reading, another tricky ‘meta-verb’, I am preventing
the poem from being immobile. Yet, assuming my intrusiveness does not affect the new
version of the poem, what critical (or otherwise) advantage have we gained?
First and foremost, by eliminating all verbs, the reader is given a condensed text of words
that may or may not exist in ‘proper’ grammatical terms. But what else? For one, the
new version allows us to focus on specific words or phrases in all their power – this is to
say, phrases where the force has not been diluted by more words or syllables:
summer
no more-
These four lines seem to benefit from being ‘unverbified’. The fragmented rhythm
created by the line-ends and the caesurae creates the impression of weakness, a
difficulty in breathing. The auditor participates in this difficulty by being cut off at each
line-end – he/she must pause, either to reflect or to prepare, and by doing so, he/she
mimics the imagery. Like the dying breaths of summer, the sudden jolts created by the
void of the verbs crafts a more dramatic ambiance. Specifically, the words ‘out of reach’
and ‘no more’ become more prominent. As a result, the reader gains a heightened sense
of the transitional mood of the poem, and the preoccupation with the ephemeral.
forward/
uncertainly:
Though these two words, one a preposition and one an adverb, a lot can be inferred
about the nature of language and its complexity. Instinctively, the reader inserts verbs of
his/her own at this point. For instance, the subject may be leaning forward, looking
uncertainly, walking uncertainly, or falling forward. What the addition of the verb
‘plunging’ does is add specificity – although every reader may anticipate a different mode
of ‘plunging’, there is no doubt that the subject is plunging forward uncertainly. Without
the verb however, the poem creates more questions, yet still manages to imply action. In
other words, even the immobile poem is mobile. The rhythm of the two words ultimately
enhances the uncertainty, almost as if the words are tip-toeing to their conclusion, one
pause at a time.
What this suggests is something that seems far too obvious to be expressed – language
operates on an intra-cellular and an extra-cellular level. Each word informs itself, and
each word informs a different word. However, what stands to be gained from
participating in such an exercise of ‘de-verbification’ or even ‘de-adjectivisation’ and ‘de-
nounisation’ is that we pay so much more attention to the intra-cellular properties of
words, in a way that we couldn’t had the word been hidden by others. In this mode of
presentation, the word itself features, and the critic’s duty to the word is to unearth the
hidden nuances that beg to be discovered. So, thanking ‘Hands’ for stimulating me to
consider stripping away as a form of enhancement, I must deduce that close reading is
good, but microscopic reading is far better.
A similar thing occurs with 'fallen': 'fallen' as an adjective remains, but it is stripped of its
associational richness: the obsession with falling is lost, and with it a sizeable portion of
the poem's atmosphere. The poem's 'preoccupation with the ephemeral' might be
heightened on the one hand but it is by the same practice lessened on the other: the
coming together of hands is less emphatic, and the word fall, in its various incarnations -
as cliché, as figured in the form autumn, as a state of being - is displaced from the poem's
web of meaning. And yet unlike the complicating presence of 'caught', the verbs here
organise the natural chaos of
synapsical lapse
in a darkling wood,
frozen but
somehow, somehow
hands together
in the darkling wood
– the sensation of falling, hands coming together- these types of movement can be
governing forces to otherwise directionless states or events.
Leading on from this, there is much to be gained from breaking down the following
passage (taken from the ending of ‘The Dead’) into its basic units:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He
watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had
come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was
general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on
the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was
falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It
lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the
barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Gabriel's soul has very recently 'approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the
dead', and upon first reading that feeling of epiphany is ineffably understood- Gabriel is
looking out of the window at the snow and somehow we think we know how Gabriel
feels. The practice of stripping a text to its bare bones can be of some use here. Strip it
down till you're left with adjectives and adverbs and this is what you get:
softly crooked
faintly barren
The self, the soul, the snow- all moving parts associated with sensitive movements and a
kind of grace. The central plain, the hills, the Bog of Allen, all the starker for having been
disentangled- more dark, more treeless, more barren. By tying them to their constituent
parts you recalibrate the picture into greater clarity (but crucially the picture remains the
same).
So as far as I can see the benefits of microscopic reading lie in retrospect, when meaning
has been established and needs to be challenged or affirmed. What can I not put my
finger on? Whatever it is it comes from the poet, but the impetus must be with the active
voice of the poem before we can make sense of what it is saying. We can indeed ‘de-
verb’ or ‘de-noun’, because it is a useful practice, but it must lead us to places where we
would not have otherwise ended up… with this in mind I offer up the verbs of 'Hands',
trembling
(caught)
plunging
falling
come (-ing)
falling
turning
stirring.
“Tears of Saudade;
Gadabout Press, October ed., 2013
An Exploration of Melancholy and Nostalgia Viewed Through Foreign Eyes
Since the inception of the spoken word, language has been used as an expression of
emotion. Countless words and phrases have been dedicated to such ethereal
concepts as “Joy”, “Sadness”, “Anger” and “Love”, and the emotional spectrum of
language is a vast, complex quagmire of connotations and meaning.
While many languages have similar phrases and words to saudade (the English verb
“To Pine” has a similar meaning, for instance), none come quite as close to the sheer
intensity that this word possesses. It is present in ballads and plays, songs and
literature, and the concept haunts the lyrical poetry of Portugal and Brazil. An entire
subgenre of music, fado , dating back to the first half of the 19th century, has been
dedicated to the concept. The most beautiful and startlingly poignant use of the term,
however, can be found in the anonymous piece “Lágrimas de Saudade, taken from the
Cancioneiro de Paris (ff. 23v-24):
“Tears of Saudade come, do not linger, for by tarrying you kill me”
Used in this context it is possible to understand saudade in all of its depth and
complexity; it is as much of a state of being as it is an emotion, capable of
encompassing a heart entirely. It is the lament of Juliette, the agony of Van Gogh, and
can be reflected in the strangest of places (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds describe
their album “The Good Son” as an example of saudade, and the upbeat 2007 song Torn
on the Platform by Jack Penãte has many elements of fado). It is strange, then, that
this truly universal emotion is only portrayed in its entirety in Portuguese.
The reason for this, perhaps, lies in the culture and history of Portugal. The word
itself became a staple of Portuguese culture around the 15th and 16th century,
coinciding with an era known as the “Great Portuguese Discoveries”, a time when
explorers left their homeland to travel the length and breadth of the world. It was in
this time of discovery and colonisation that many travellers went missing, presumed
dead in one of the many misguided tours that plagued the time. This dark period in
history, scarred by unresolved disappearances and populated by grieving families, is
possibly the reason as to why what was already a nation of poets felt the need to
define and express this most unique, passionate, and indeed haunting form of
longing.
There is a transitory breath filling my lungs. The past is a beautiful fantasy whose pages I
leaf through to pass the time. I will remember always the lost pattern of your palm; your
face seems more familiar to the backs of my eyes than when I knew you.
There are others here, sometimes. Old men with wedding rings embedded into the soft
inner flesh of their curled fists. Children whose parents will ‘be right back’. Those
breathing anachronisms, ghostly boys and girls frozen in moments they never
experienced. Mostly, however, we do not understand the mess of sounds which spill
from each other’s mouths- only the meaning of the head cradling the hand, only the
voice of the eyes looking to the horizon in hopes that the four-thousand-and-fifth train
will deliver more than disappointment. We acknowledge this common language with a
stilted nod of the head. I do not want to recognise their waiting as the same as mine. I
know it is different. You promised to return.
The station, incidentally, is beautiful. It is the house of eternal hope. Stagnant, radiant,
pulsing with a low hued want. The points on the left and right where the tracks meet the
sky are also the points of the sunset and sunrise. Mysteriously, the tracks seem, I think,
to meet the sea as they leave this place and approach the East. No one here has dared to
ever leave and find out if this is true, or if it is merely (surely) a trick of the eye.
Station Saudade undergoes constant refurbishment. Over the years I have marvelled at
the bright Colonial arches, bleeding into the sleek modern glass skylights. Some areas
are simpler than others. The platform upon which we wait is comfortable and plain. We
want for nothing, yet our wanting is our everything. They never tell you of the torment of
a beautiful purgatory, one where the smell of bread and the twinkle of fresh fruit all
tastes like ash in the mouth. We do not trust the artificial blind stare of the Colonial
arches and glass skylights, only the firm ground which stretches out its arms across the
world in longing for the sky.
Occasionally I exchange a few words with other inhabitants of the platform. I eventually
gave up asking them for the time. A strange thing happened recently however: a train
stopped, and, as usual, we all stared wearily at the nothingness it delivered. Then a
young woman standing not far from me slowly took five shaky steps towards the open
doors. We watched, drawn to the clap of shoes on the ground in this motionless
landscape. For hours or days she stood before the gaping doors. She cried silently- then
stopped, her expression like dust but for where the tears had left their clean fingered
traces. We waited, watching with quiet disbelief. A few people went to her side, hoping
to help guide her back, show her the arrivals board perhaps, remind her of what she had
Gadabout Press, October ed., 2013
been waiting for and tell her it wouldn’t be long now- but she did not, perhaps could not,
say a word, nor draw her eyes from the open doors. I tried to study her to find out what
she was missing, but it was difficult to tell.
The others eventually dispersed, convinced of the futility of their efforts and hers. Few
people leave this destination once they arrive. There is too much comfort in reviving the
past through memories. She seemed statuesque before the mouth of the train for
several sunsets, causing unease for the other passengers. What if she was delaying the
trains? Their looks became dark and unfriendly. I watched her, wondering how to
remove her.
Then: in a gesture so slight I almost missed it, it happened. She said quite simply, quite
comprehensibly: ‘It is finished.’ With that, as if her hesitation had been only seconds
long, she casually boarded the train with the ease of an everyday commuter. The doors
hissed closed behind her like an embrace. The engine started. The train moved on. On
the platform we exchanged puzzled, curious glances, but said nothing.
I thought of envying her: instead, I knew we all only felt a sense of mild incredulity and
pity as we continued to look towards the horizon, waiting.
I see it as fairly basic within the concept of emotional abuse or emotional violence that one
arrogates the faculties of meaning and does violence primarily upon these. Hermeneutics are tainted
with the ambivalence of the whole world; they give us both the chance to liberate and subjugate. By
taking control of the medium of thought we can impose ourselves and our world upon the other.
How profound could this violence though? Perhaps it is not just good enough to seize hold of the
linguistic structure and force the other to bide by your rules of sense. Wouldn’t it be far greater still
to make the mute rock speak and weave a binding translation out of the flex of silent forms? You see
if one can make mute materiality human in a most significant sense - if one strips even marble of its
salvific opacity - then one can do anything to anyone. I’m sure Barberini, patron of the arts, knew
well of his own performance in their appropriation.
Our own voice of depraved Cardinale here, marching his poor victim around Rome, knows well the
power of art in this sense. He demands a mute silence from his poor belle as much as Bellini needs
his stone to stay perfectly still as it is hacked away, yielding into the desired form. The voice carves
away at her as she stares, dominated, at these carvings. He reflects emotionally the bankruptcy of
this particular aesthetic ideal in the interpersonal sphere.
Domination. The imposition that freezes the other into pure materiality to be shaped and
coerced and figured by words and thoughts till mere contortions of rock – dumb and supple to the
mercy of the meaning of the other - are left. He, though, rushed on himself, less and less able to
converse with the works or the world around him; left to snap judgements, the laziness of his own
whims. He just wants to hurry onwards back to that nice warm welcoming cunt. It is profoundly
difficult to really engage with art in the monologic form. You just want to end up appropriating the
centre of your own pleasure manifested in the figure of the other. You rush strait for the cunt and
forget dinner. You forget to listen to the tremble of the voice or the litheness of the arms postured
gracefully. He shapes his poor lady as Bellini shaped the medium of formal domination he
appropriates. He fundamentally misses the point of art and life somewhat. It is only if the primal
question remains intact (that which he finds unbecoming, the doubt that shatters the quality of
ignorance), that the realm of beauty is birthed. This is what separates the connoisseur from the
boorish sex-pest, the sensitive critic from a dilettantish domestic abuser. The poem is really very
good, but I hope to god there isn’t too much biography in it.
J. R. W. S
The Cambridge English Faculty is famous for ‘Practical Criticism’, a method of commentary in
which students are given a short text and asked to say as much about, around, over or behind it as they
can in the space of an hour; the response to which I respond here is an example of the fruit generated by
this critical discipline.
I am grateful to the respondent for his praise of my poem; however his comments demand some
correction in a few places. I’m assuming the respondent to be male because most women, at least in my
acquaintance, might have been quicker to see the point of this poem. More on that below.
First, the opening sentence: “I’m sure that to many people the closest one could get to equating
the art of sculpture and the art of Sade is a vague notion involving a particularly depraved use of a
Neolithic dildo.” Perhaps not: cf. the Cent-vingt journées de Sodome, and the rest of the divin marquis’s
writings passim: there are many dildoes to be encountered, all of more recent make. I am not aware of
any Neolithic examples, in the British Museum or elsewhere; the respondent may be thinking of an awl
that has been miscatalogued. What, though, would a ‘particularly depraved use’ be with respect to a
dildo? I am innocent of more half a dozen at the utmost, all of which are variations on the two basic
ones anyway. It’s only in the twentieth century that the notion of skullfucking attained any kind of
currency; this seems exclusively verbal though, and one wonders whether it has ever been practised. To
use a miscatalogued awl might be to defeat the purpose of this brutally degrading (and likely fictional)
practice.
“It is possibly of great advantage to myself that I am presently not particularly in possession of
the faculties required to imagine how this vision would unfold.” The reader must sweep away dust and
cobwebs with an elbow before looking closely at this prose; though as it seems to be filler (expressed in a
clumsily bureaucratic English) there is no need for hard scrutiny. This was put it merely to get the word
count up on this Prac. Crit. once the respondent ran out of things to say. “Luckily this poem saves me
the trouble of having to persevere too strenuously down the initial line of thought.” Of course, the poem
suggests nothing of the sort, except to a reader who hasn’t been reading closely –– not the route to a First
on a Prac. Crit. I wonder how the respondent got here, unless he has a vague and inaccurate memory of
certain passages in Bataille, Barthes and Deleuze, which he has fused together, mistaken for Sade and
then tried to force violently into this poem. You don’t need violence to make Play-Doh stick, though.
Anyway, this reading is already so distant from the text that the respondent might not be in English
Literature at all, as only an Anthropologist could write like this without embarrassment. Not a student of
Arch. & Anth. of course, as then he would have seen how inaccurate he was with his unfunny Neolithic
dildo in the first place.
“This work sets out a far more nuanced possibility of marmoreal misuse.” I hope that that
alliteration isn’t a stylistic flourish –– it’s even worse that two ‘that’s in a row. But at least he’s almost got
back to the text, with an allusion to a later passage in the poem about a statue of Venus (if he’s referring
to anything else then he should take a cold shower and re-read the poem). Sexual assaults on the famous
Cnidian Venus were something of a commonplace in antiquity; the anecdotes seem apocryphal though at
least they might have some oblique or indirect relation to Ovid’s version of the Pygmalion story. Has the
respondent heard of Ovid, I wonder.
“I see it as fairly basic within the concept of emotional abuse or emotional violence that one
arrogates the faculties of meaning and does violence primarily upon these.” Tell that to the victims. Just
try. You won’t be the most popular visitor at the Battered Women’s Shelter but you’ll certainly get a
Gadabout Press, October ed., 2013
response, and it’s not gonna be a hug. Or else go find people who’ve been in an abusive relationship.
French theory didn’t help them and it’s not going to help you either. “Hermeneutics are tainted with the
ambivalence of the whole world; they give us both the chance to liberate and to subjugate.” The
respondent has taken the latter option and sadistically strapped Meaning into a painful harness in order to
provide piggy-back rides for the swollen, monstrous, hideously overweight figure of Critical Theory,
whose only purpose here is to abuse Meaning for a series of ill-defined and hazily thought-out ends. That
doesn’t make it any better no matter what your expensive barrister tries to argue.
Let’s skip ahead a few sentences: the respondent has set a noble precedent in not bothering to
read the whole thing, for which we offer qualified thanks. “If one strips even marble of its salvific
opacity –– then one can do anything to anyone.” Formal logic isn’t widely studied at Cambridge, is it?
How exactly does one strip marble of ‘salvific opacity’, whatever that is? My dim memories of chemistry
suggest that turning marble into glass would be a bit of an effort even for a fictional alchemist. It’s much
easier to burn down marble into lime, as generations of barbaric Roman entrepreneurs discovered during
the Dark Ages. “I’m sure Barberini, patron of the arts, knew well of his own performance in their
appropriation.” Quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini as the Renaissance sgraffito goes; I hope Pope
Urban VIII wasn’t so perpetually drunk as to be unconscious of his own activities in any sphere, though
he was a shrewd man, especially if he could understand the point the respondent is trying to make here.
The style of this response is curious. It’s never wise to aim for allusive mandarin-style prose
when you lack the languages and requisite common knowledge: no doubt ‘Cardinale’ here refers to the
actress Claudia Cardinale, who (as far as its author can make out) does not appear in this poem. Nor,
directly, does any Prince of the Church, who will be referred to in conversation as ‘Your Eminence’,
‘Eminenza’ or ‘Cardinal’ –– ‘Cardinale’ is best used in Italian, if you speak Italian, and a cardinal has
anything to do with what you’re talking about in the first place. More serious is the respondent’s
reference to ‘Bellini’. ‘Bernini’, surely. Gianlorenzo Bernini was the most talented sculptor in sixteenth-
century Rome; ‘Bellini’ is either the quattrocento Venetian master Giovanni Bellini, brother-in-law of
Andrea Mantegna, or else a sweet cocktail that I have never tasted but is often associated with Samantha
from ‘Sex and the City’. There is no reference anywhere in this work to Giovanni Bellini, Andrea
Mantegna or Samantha from ‘Sex and the City’. Wikipedia can’t be that hard to use, can it? Practical
Criticism fails again.
“The voice carves away at her as she stares, dominated, at these carvings.” What a captivating, if
nauseatingly creepy, fantasy. If only it had something to do with anything in this poem. Actually, thank
Heaven it doesn’t. Let me point out in passing that a ‘carving’ and a ‘sculpture’ are two very different
things. “He reflects emotionally the bankruptcy of this particular aesthetic ideal in the interpersonal
sphere.” I wonder what this aesthetic idea is, since nobody has mentioned it, though one of the fatter
American critics has developed a tiresome notion of ‘creative misreading’. Maybe this is an example. Of
course there is also such a thing as being sloppy and missing the point. Without it we would be deprived
of so much modern journalism. A little further below, the respondent mentions “snap judgements” and
“the laziness of his own whims”.
“He just wants to hurry onwards back to that warm, welcoming cunt.” And which of us doesn’t,
except for roughly half of the population, and between eleven and fifteen percent of the remainder. Still,
let’s show a little sensitivity to minorities here, as long as we don’t have recourse to more fatuous critical-
theory language.
The respondent has spectacularly, absurdly, ludicrously missed the point of this poem. Criticism
has many functions; let’s hope a primary one isn’t to show off how much tedious secondary literature you
Overall mark: 52. This student is advised to see the Dean immediately; I recommend that he de-
grade before final exams lest he disgrace the College with his results.
Responses
to A Reverie Upon Translation – Jaspreet
to King Onisilos – Margherita; Jamaal Raoof (image)
to Missed Au Revoir and Babel – Liam
to Liam’s response – Jamaal Raoof
to Hands – Michael
to Michael’s response – Callum Wayne
to Tears of Saudade – Meena Qureshi
to A Guided Tour of Rome – John Stowell
to John’s response – Jaspreet S. Bopari