Paolo Bartoloni – Senior Lecturer,
Dep. of Italian studies & International and Comparative Literary Studies,
University of Sydney

Translating Australian Spaces Conferences, Sydney, November 20-21, 2006
Translating Images 2006

In 2005 the Australian artist Miriam Cabello went to Italy on a research visit. She spent most of her time at the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, drawing and sketching Michelangelo’s famous "I prigioni" (The Slaves). The year before she had been in Paris, at the Louvre, where two more "Slaves", the Dieing and Rebellious Slaves, are held.
Miriam looked, observed, studied and then transposed on white drawing paper what she was seeing, trusting her eyes but also the emotions and feelings generated by being in Italy and France, at the Accademia and the Louvre. We might speculate that the lines that started to take shape on Miriam’s paper were produced by a mixture of stimuli, and ordered by a technique that the painter and the drawer put to the test and refine incessantly as they probe another artist’s technique. It was as if, in a sense, Miriam confronted her style by embracing Michelangelo’s style and technique. It is perhaps something like the wish to extend the knowledge of oneself by entering the world of another person; a departure the result of which is, almost invariably, the beginning of further trajectories renewing the self and the interlocuting other.

Is this dialogue between one of the most significant Renaissance artists, Michelangelo, and a contemporary Australian artist, Cabello, any different from the one staged by a literary translator? Indeed, can we legitimately speak of translation in the case of Cabello? Answers to these and other attendant questions might sharpen our understanding of the translation process, providing new perspectives on the work and the task of the translator.

One of the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Giorgio Caproni, once wrote that the process of translation had taught him to speak more gently to things. His translations of French authors such a Celine, Genet, Char are considered at once great works of poetry as well as excellent examples of translation technique and strategies. Not only was Caproni able to capture the mysterious ways of the poetic language, he also managed to control it through a careful mastery of poetic techniques. As a poet translating another poet, Caproni revisited the mechanisms and the world of poetry by allowing another to lead, indicate, prompt. And yet, the prompting of the original is also an invitation to follow, not so much to the end as to the beginning, to that moment when the page of the original is still white. A successful translation is that in which the author invites the translator to rewind the work, tracing back the steps of its inception one by one to the moment of the beginning. It is at that moment that the process of "writing again" can take place, and the work can start to re-emerge. In his famous essay on translation, "The Task of the Translator" (1923), Walter Benjamin defined translation as the Uberleben ("other life") of the original, catching the quintessential element of translation as an extra life of the original, a work which is simultaneously a continuation but also a departure; the locus where sameness and difference coexist.

By rewinding the original, the translator rewinds herself too, reflecting once more on the tools of her profession, her language and techniques. And if the translator is a poet or an artist, this going back implies a deep examination of the aesthetic as well as the poetic processes, the results of which might be considerable. It is in this sense that Caproni’s simple statement about learning to speak more gently to things through the process of translation acquires a meaning that is both philosophical and poetically foundational. The example of Caproni is not without analogy to the process that Cabello started at the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Louvre. Both the poet and the artist attempted to re-write the already written by following a lead that they knew had to be broken in order to do justice to themselves as artists and to the original as that which, as Walter Benjamin stated, demands to be continued.

In the case of Michelangelo’s "The Slaves" the invitation to continue is deliciously and inevitably provided by the statues’ inherent incompleteness. And yet, the mere fact that Michelangelo left "The Captives" incomplete should not divert our attention from the fact that all originals are invariably and by necessity incomplete, ambiguous, invoking all sorts of possibilities that beg to be followed and explored. It is plain, however, that "The Captives" are the emblem of an artistic threshold, alluding simultaneously to a possible actuality (the finished work) as well as to a possible negativity (the reversal to the untouched block of marble). Is their intention to veil or unveil, to cover or uncover? And what exactly do we mean by covering and uncovering? I believe that a discussion of translation from the perspectives of the notions of veiling and unveiling, rather than from those of equivalence and faithfulness, difference and sameness, might bring about further insights into the process of translation and translatability.

Whereas equivalence, faithfulness, difference and sameness are issues pertaining to technical strategies (equivalence and faithfulness) and the sociology of translation (difference and sameness), veiling and unveiling point at once to the dialogue between translation and original as two separate yet connected texts as well as, and perhaps more importantly, an aesthetic relation that incorporates technical but also emotional and symbolic parameters.

Translation is not a mere repetition of a text in another language or in another form. Translation has never been and can never be a simple copy of a given text, as much as traditional theories of translation might induce as to believe through the emphasis on faithfulness and adherence. Translation is the act that brings to light the potential of the original, and that, therefore, extends the original not by changing it but by pursuing the possibility of the original further. Translation is that which allows the original to speak itself otherwise and, perhaps, to say the same but differently. Translation is possible and necessary if and when the original is translatable; if and when the original invites interventions which are potential within its narrative. All texts are potentially translatable, and yet some texts are more translatable then others, their openness and becoming more obvious and apparent. Translatability is, in a sense, at once a synonym and an antonym of reproducibility in that a translation reproduces the original by arriving at a text which is both recognisable and yet different.

Accuracy is the term and the mode of intervention that more than others fits the process of translation predicated upon translatability. A translation is accurate when it catches accurately the coming toward us, and as such outside of itself, of the original; when, as Walter Benjamin remarks, the translation captures the echoes of the original. In "The Task of the Translator" Benjamin speaks of the original as a forest, and of the translation as that which remains at the edge of the forest. The translation, and the translator, can never be inside the forest, can never be the original. The translation and the translator can only see the surface (the edge of the forest) but, and this is of utmost importance, they can also integrate the surface with those echoes which, belonging to the centre of the forest, rise above it to be heard and seen. Those echoes must be heard accurately in order to reproduce the original according to its inherent translatability. This is the great challenge but also the infinite fascination of the translation process. What are these echoes made of, and how do they speak to us?

They are made of a combination of sounds; linguistic, visual, cultural. Moreover, they include the experience of the original as well as the experience of the culture, the language and the visual stimuli of the translation. These echoes are at the threshold of textuality, and as such, they inhabit the interstices between original and translation. They are in fact the very thing that makes translation possible, and that determines the translatability of the original. To explain this point, Benjamin referred to language and to the difference between words. He said that the German word for bred, "brot", is different from the French word for bread "pain", and yet they refer to the same thing. What he meant is that the German and the French words are not equivalent because the concept they refer to is rather spurious. They can only be accurately transposed when the translator can arrive at the thing that both words imply. And yet this thing is invariably removed, pushed aside when it is transformed, through language, into a concept the connotations of which assume cultural, social and political determinants that vary from culture to culture. The thing can perhaps be captured as an echo that hovers in-between cultures, suspended on a threshold in which the unicity of the thing might potentially be arrived at not as a concept in this or that language or culture but as an image or a sound that is simultaneously universal and unique. And this in not only valid for single words, it can also be extended to entire texts and narratives.

This is why, as I remarked earlier, the task of the translator is far from being simply technical or even cross-cultural, it must become aesthetic too. By aesthetic I mean here a mode of being that combines an acute sense and disposition to feel, select, discern and enter the symbolic world of the text that one chooses to interact with.

Michelangelo worked on "The Slaves" from 1505, the year of the commission from Pope Giulio II, to 1545. The extant statues were supposed to be part of a larger architectonic project conceived as the funerary monument of Pope Giulio II. The commission was interrupted a few times, the first time for the direct intervention of the Pope himself who had apparently changed his mind about the architectonic plan. It was started again later, but was not finished in time for the funeral and entombment of the Pope in 1513. Giulio II’s heirs pressed Michelangelo to complete the series but either the priority he had to give to other commissions or his own reluctance to finish the work meant that "The Slaves" remained a work in progress, in fact, one of the most famous examples of work in progress. According to some critics, Michelangelo’s attitude to this series of sculptures might be explained by the belief that gradually formed in his mind that "The Slaves" represented the struggle of the soul as it strives to free itself from the strictures of the body. Would a complete, polish figure do more justice to this concept than something that embodies this struggle in its very fabric, as its very way of being? Michelangelo’s answer to this question might very well be the incompleteness of "The Slaves".

The soul might not be a pressing issue in the post-industrial and globalized society of the 21st Century. That doesn’t mean that some possible cognates, such as identity and singularity are also irrelevant. The soul might have lost its religious and transcendental implications and changed into something more secular in the passage from a world dominated by God to a world transversed by the absence of God. Indeed, in the society of the spectacle in which even capitalism is transforming its modus operandi from production to fiction, it remains essential, even perhaps more vital, to revive and refresh our feeling and discussion with regard to the unique singularity of the individual. It is in this context that a contemporary translation of Michelangelo’s "The Slaves" is not only relevant but also aesthetically and culturally significant.
While Cabello retains the primary purpose of Michelangelo’s "The Slaves", she also adds to it by introducing a series of elements which are deliciously attuned to the contemporaneous. I am especially thinking of the colours, the strong, pastel-like thickness of the reds and the green, but also, and perhaps more indicatively, of the effects that these colours take on when applied to garments; so that simple strips and cloths turn into colourful singlets and underware. And yet, and this seems to me the most powerful and successful trait of this translation, it is uncertain whether Cabello’s "Slaves" are taking these garments off or on. Are they captured in the moment of dressing or undressing? Not only does the ambiguity of Cabello’s "Slaves" accurately translates the becoming of Michelangelo’s originals as they are posed between visibility and invisibility, she also takes Michelangelo’s work further by extending it, and by granting it an Uberleben that was perhaps already inscribed in it. Not that Michelangelo had predicted life in the society of the "posts". More simply, he had understood life as an incessant and ongoing process of becoming, the essence of which might be captured not so much in the crystallized and perfect image as in that which remains open, ambiguous and unfinished. Cabello’s "The Slaves" at once testifies to Michelangelo’s modernity and to the contemporary condition in which identity struggles incessantly against the pressure of a reality which is becoming increasingly fictive.

For further reading visit http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/ccs-purdue.html