by Prof. Andreas Altenhoff
Real Time & Real Life
C’è ancora qualcosa da tradurre?
Machine-translated ––– Italian to English:
Excerpt:
Chapter 3
Impossible translations
The arts
“poetry/film”
This very question has been addressed over the years by several hundred people involved in the cycle of “poetry/film” projects at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne: young artists and filmmakers, teachers, writers, film crews, production and organizational staff. Within the framework of this project, twenty-two films were produced; one of them is “[TUNIS],” which we will see at the end of this presentation.
At the beginning of the seminar, all filmmakers received an anthology of contemporary poetry. The poems were discussed in depth, with the recommendation to avoid tautologies, meaning: not to try to repeat through images what the text supposedly says. Afterwards, the participants selected a poem, interpreted it, and developed a visual concept. Only after shooting was completed did the filmmakers personally meet the authors, and only after the films were shown in cinemas and at numerous festivals were the literary authors invited to describe, in a “resonance,” the effect the film had on them in relation to their poem. In other words: a correspondence between the arts, as repeatedly invoked since Dadaism and Futurism, through visual poetry, pop literature and street art, described as a reciprocal interpenetration, an unraveling or an abolition of the boundaries between the arts.
Words in film: a translation
Lia Sáile: “[TUNIS]”, 2018
Quote Kais (in film):
“If you simply translate it literally,
it loses much of its power.”
Four young people – Abir Akriche-Jendoubi, Ferdaous Kabteni, Kais Jendoubi and Majed Mihoub – are sitting together in Cologne, focused on a few sheets of paper. They are working on translating the poem “[Tunis],” assisted by Walid Ben Nasr, the “phone joker” in Tunis. Apparently, they do not personally know the author, Adrian Kasnitz, referring to him only by the personal pronoun (“him”), but they have already spent three hours studying the twelve lines of his text. The meeting will continue for several more hours.
Quote: Walid, “the absent expert” (in film)
“[TUNIS]” – the capital letters indicate the change of medium; artistic and cinematic works often appear in uppercase – gives an impression, through numerous fades, of how long and how intensely the four will continue working on their task. The final result will be three texts: a poem, a translation, and a re-translation of the translation, which freely takes the liberty of rewriting the poem. And a film.
Fade to Black
At first glance, this film seems to be a documentary about the craft of translation. However, the four are not experts; the director has asked them to engage with the text, inviting them to participate in an experiment that explores exchange, appropriation, the familiar and the foreign, similar to Lia Sáile’s artistic project “Between the Lights” from 2018, in which she exchanged two streetlights from the twin cities of Tunis and Cologne and planted them in a new and complementary environment.
Majed “mixing wins”
The cinematic techniques also show that “[TUNIS]” does not merely reproduce a working process. The fades make it clear that the transformation of the poem took much longer than the narrated time. The handheld camera (Katja Rivas Pinzon) circles around the translators, just as their reflections revolve around the text. It rarely withdraws, remaining focused on faces and hands in the foreground, repeatedly directing the viewer’s gaze to the notes, as if urging the group to hurry.
Abir
It is unclear whether the room extends further, or how it might be furnished. The light gray and yellow sofa covers appear briefly at the edge of the frame; the four people wear T-shirts in similar light colors. At the end, two panning shots show glasses, white cups, handwritten sheets, a dictionary.
This stylization highlights the in-between world of poetic production. The text of “[Tunis]” is spoken in fragments and thus appears as a recitation in the film. Even though it is written in a language familiar to them, it initially remains foreign to the translators, as perhaps every poem does that demands interpretative effort. Paradoxically, the object that the author places in the distance is familiar to them. During the appropriation of the poem, an exchange takes place. The message of a foreign place moves away from the familiar language and returns transformed by a foreign, yet familiar language.
Ferdaous “talking oneself hoarse”
“[TUNIS]” reveals what would have remained invisible in translation: the experience of “foreign-speaking” (E. Kinsky), as well as the decision to deviate from the original task and to counter the text to be interpreted with an entirely arbitrary interpretation of their own, to make translation itself the subject, the crossing of the sea – that mare nostrum which has always belonged to “us” and always brings ruin to “them.” Only the film legitimizes this violation of textual fidelity. In its polyphony, it preserves both the original and the modification by undertaking yet another translation – the translation from reading and speaking into seeing and hearing, from the atemporal presence of the text into the temporal extension of the image sequence.
Different media follow different rules, but they can interact and be translated to another level: the formula “poetry/film” should also be understood in this sense.
Adrian Kassnitz
The author whose text was the subject of the conversations between Abir, Ferdoustan, Kais and Majed commented on Lia Sáile’s film, which takes place on a third level, as follows:
Adrian Kasnitz
Wonder, translate, transgress.
In the beginning, there is always a sense of wonder. A sense of wonder when one’s own text, the written form of language and images that arise in the mind, suddenly becomes a film and becomes visible to others. A sense of wonder at what a “reader” – and with that I include anyone who reads the text and works with it – has found in it, what fascinates them, what they have retrieved to work on. Poems, too, have already used this process, fishing something from language, spoken and written, reorganizing it, playing with it and creating a world of their own. Films can do that as well, of course. They can translate language into images, but they can also interpret themselves, explore and transcend boundaries.
In Lia Sáile’s “Tunis,” the translation of the text becomes the subject of the film. A group of young German-Tunisians discuss the poem “Tunis” and begin to translate it. The film captures the discussion of the text, the attempt to translate German into Tunisian Arabic. The group discusses the images of the text, the possible meanings, and repeatedly asks questions: Is the poem an outside view of the city or an inside one? Whom does it address? Had the author been in Tunis? Can one write about Tunis without having been there? Is it presumptuous to write about something one doesn’t know? Doesn’t it capture the Tunisian atmosphere all too accurately? If I remember correctly, there are no clear answers to these questions, but the joy of the text creates a free translation. In the end credits, one can even see the poem translated back into German, with surprising changes.
Machine translation
If translating with machines provokes no resistance, while translating with translators requires great effort, just like correspondence between the arts, then what is to be said about those who wish to translate themselves by crossing borders drawn by Frontex or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security? Of powers that impose themselves over you?
“For Skies grow thick with aviating Swine,
Ere men pass up the chance to draw a Line.”
“Denn eher lernt ein Schwein Gedicht’ verfassen
Als dass die Leut’ vom Grenzen-Ziehen lassen”
Thomas Pynchon