In the last week, I’ve been directed to enjoy not only Six Versions Of Blood Meridian by Zak Smith, Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle, but also One Drawing For Every Page Of Moby-Dick by Matt Kish. (Zak Smith also created Illustrations For Each Page Of Gravity’s Rainbow.)
Why these massifications of mass? Cormac McCarthy’s epic and Melville’s—upon which McCarthy’s is founded—are both highly visual, detailed, colorful, painterly works. Their stories (the authorized versions) are clear, even if their meanings will be debated for as long as humans are around to debate.
Ah, but here’s the genius of translation. Translation is not repetition for another audience, not performance, but re-creation, re-playing God.
Look at A Humument by Tom Phillips. Phillips admits the book out of whose guts his own visual-poetic masterpiece is painstakingly stitched is trash. He does not translate Mallock’s A Human Document, because that translation would be worse than unmoving; it would be offensive to a modern audience. Instead, he uses the field of signs of A Human Document to create an ongoing series of paintings, to tell new stories, to comment on the original, the author thereof, and the era that produced them both.
Or… he translates the book out of the book: Translates it into the painting; then out of the painting and into the multimedia product-event. A Humument has been published four times; you can buy prints of it from Phillips’s website; the book continues to grow, existing outside of time.
(Which iteration is definitive? This is the happy problem of Leaves of Grass, the bible, and all those classic unfinished texts, from The Castle to those last revisions of À la recherche du temps perdu, from Nabokov’s final emission to the unfinishable, shifting rhizomes of the internet—Wikipedia and its shadows [Uncyclopedia], any forum, the Atlas Obscura, this site…)
Two works I’ve written about here before also merge the media of “book” (word, story, argument, linearity, sound, consciousness-as-lighting-upon, abstraction and forms and modules of thoughts) and “art” (color, moment, muteness, instant all-comprehensibility, the unconscious-as-perceiving-everything, figuration and line and negative space).
What is Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini? Is it a book of “art” (a joke on us), or a “real” fictional encyclopedia (self-coherent, non-rules-breaking, so “realistic” as far as alien encyclopediae go)? Has the content of the Codex been translated from the alien, or into it? Can you articulate the distinction?
Book From The Sky by Xu Bing provides a final and I think highly molecular example. Xu made, over four years, a mesmerizing set of fake Chinese pictograms. They are technically ”devoid of semantic content” but so suggestive of content that these “pictures” of words serve as pseudo-words a la Serafini’s squiggles in the Codex, but moreso. (The Sky-words are made from elements which are real; Serafini’s squiggles can be examined at a microscopic level, but they yield if anything less meaning.)
Again, has Xu translated a book out of the infinite/infinitely strange heavens? Or has he translated human words into a higher form? Is the book so mesmerizing, for Chinese readers and non-Chinese readers alike, because it suggests we humans can never mean anything (the original title was An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century), or because we make meaning from everything, because we translate and transmediate everything?
I think books inspire pictures and music automatically, and vice versa. As I write, Deltron fades into Devendra Banhart, and I am surrounded by the postcards whose meanings (semantic, semiotic) I have forgotten but whose figures and negative spaces and limits and patterns call out to me to write a story about a pair of leopards who trade their spots with the clouds and so doom great blotches of sahel-grass to deadly shade…
