BETWEEN HERE AND NOWHERE

by John Cayley

First given as
a lecture for the
Performance Writing Degree
Dartington College of Arts
Totnes, Devon, UK
in a series of talks on
'Writing Identities and Interfaces - place, belonging and translation'
16 Jan 1998

PLEASE NOTE: This essay uses frames and a small amount of Javascript. You may have to make adjustments to your viewing options in order to get the best out of it. It was designed on an Apple Macintosh with Netscape Navigator 4.01.

TO OPERATE THE EXAMPLES OR 'PARATEXTS' it should be enough simply to move the mouse or pointer over the bar of morphed images in the uppermost frame of the page. If this does not work, clicking on the bar at various points will shift through the transliteral phases.

Thanks to Harriet Evans, Caroline Bergvall and Fiona Templeton for their readings and comments.

<01>
'Topography' might be a more neutral term applicable to the formalisms involved in some serious conventional translation, but 'geography' engages the (conservative) socio-political implications of this established literary practice.

<02>
The danger of using translation as a metaphor for writing, where writing becomes, as it were, a translation of 'experience', is precisely the introduction of these conventional geographies or topographies with their associated essentialisms, all of which I am throwing into question. In these notes, translation, modulated by transcription, is simply seen as a 'mode' of Writing (Derridean capital) which is clearly indicative of a broad range of generative writing and text-performance practices. (A materialist, literalist 'redemption' of 'free' translation is suggested, and briefly discussed in a further note below,

by certain of Walter Benjamin's writings. In one essay, Benjamin asserts, simply, 'Translation is a mode.' TT, p. 70.)

<04>
The significance of the transitional states quoted will made clear below. For the purposes of the present example, they should be bracketed or ignored and only the passages marked 0.0.0 and 0.1.F should be considered. The World Wide Web references - 'href' - will also be explained below.
.

The original poem is 'Hanjiang lin fan' or 'Gazing over the Flood of the Han River'. A complete, free translation, 'Here and Nowhere,' from which the final double-couplet is quoted, can be read in: John Cayley, INK BAMBOO, London: Agenda & Bellew, 1996, p. 21.
For other discussions of Chinese-English translation, see:

Arthur Cooper, the introduction to his LI PO AND TU FU, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, pp. 15-100.

J. H. Prynne, 'China Figures,' in Anne Birrell trans., NEW SONGS FROM A JADE TERRACE, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp. 363-392.

John Cayley, "To keep them from falling" - on some of the Translator's Responsibilities' RENDITIONS, 21 & 22 (Spring & Autumn 1984) pp. 331-348.

John Cayley, 'Classical Chinese Poetry,' in Chan Sin-wai and David E Pollard eds. AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TRANSLATION: Chinese-English, English-Chinese, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1995, pp. 758-72.

<05>
The example shows two screen shots from the animated version of 'wine flying'. On the left a complete free translation; on the right the trace of a reading path where the words (as here in this animated gif illustration) are presented on the screen in the order: 'turquoise butterfly flying under scarlet flowers'. Qian Qi; John Cayley trans. &c. WINE FLYING, London: Wellsweep, 1988 (disk for Apple Macintosh and Hypercard).

<06>
I originally wrote 'manipulable' for 'programmable'. I am attempting to indicate the reusable, renewable linguistic elements of a text, sensible to the (re)writer as raw material, the manifold elements of a text which, for example, make it 'scriptible' (writerly) in Barthes' terms. But this word and other potential synonyms - malleable, plastic, ductile, etc. - seem to be derogatory of the material they qualify (as well as mostly being from a manual and sculptural, mould-making, men-of-clay metaphoric complex). Such material is badly characterized as willing to suffer abuse. 'Programmable' is more neutral in this regard and attractive for a number of reasons, including its association with coding and algorithmic composition. I tend to read 'programming' as 'prior writing', inscription prior to performances realized in any number of ways, including publication. See also Jacques Derrida; Spivak trans., OF GRAMMATOLOGY, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 9 & 84.

<07>
The quoted phrase is from Derrida, OF GRAMMATOLOGY, p. 81.

Throughout these notes - which are very much an essay in applied grammatology - the word 'letter' should be read as applying to 'an irreducible element of inscription' in a grammatological sense, although I will normally also be using it to refer to actual graphic forms as used in everyday writing systems (mostly, in my transliterations, the letters used to write English). The point is that both roman alphabetic characters in English and Chinese characters are instances of letters in this grammatological sense.

While we tend to think of our own letters as primarily phonetic (hence underpinning phonocentrism) they are as much signifiers of what Derrida calls 'a synergy and fundamental synesthesia' (p. 89) as Chinese characters. Conversely we 'hallucinate' Chinese characters as primarily ideograms or logograms when they, too, have, amongst other aspects, phonetic signification.

<08>
The two senses of literal will be distinguished as follows: the common-sense ('word-for-word (or character)', 'close paraphrase') meaning will always be enclosed in scare-quotes; otherwise, the word should be read as 'relating to letters', as outlined two paragraphs above and in the accompanying note.

<09>
Here, I am claiming that, for example, the figurative, symbolic or abstract content of a text becomes more readily treatable, legible, SCRIPTIBLE (to use Barthes' term) if this strong sense of the literal is invoked and specifically when such content is treated to the same kind of transliteral processes as those which are shown in the examples below.

It would be worth investigating whether this might provide a more fruitful, generative understanding of the influence of Chinese poetic practice on early Modernism, and subsequent American poetry in particular. Compare, for example:

Fenollosa, Ernest, THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY: an Ars Poetica, with a forward and notes by Ezra Pound, London: Stanley Nott, 1936.

Gefin, Laszlo K., IDEOGRAM: Modern American Poetry, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1982.

Qian Zhaoming, ORIENTALISM AND MODERNISM, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

<10>
I am using 'co-creative' to characterize both writerly reading and varieties of actual scriptible textuality which are implied by programmable media, and also by the writing practice set out here. 'Co-critical' is simply the extension of such principles into the critical project (where, paradoxically, the reader/writer structures are more clearly instituted - 'co-critical' is perhaps a greater transgression than 'co-creative'?).

<11>
Please note that although the basic routine is quite simple, the actual algorithm used is moderately complex – the arrangement of replacement letter sequences is a calculated compromise based on phonemic relations between letters and their frequencies in written English; the phasing of letter replacements is quasi-random and differentially weighted by phase; and there are routines which tend first to preserve and then reconstitute new word boundaries towards either textual/tabular end point.

<12>
They also relate directly to earlier mesostic work of my own, which is shown in examples 5 and 6, where letters may be used to link word across languages (6) or elaborate the meanings of a text through literal connections with a commentary on it (5).

<13>
The poem is 'Lu zhai' or 'Deer Park'. A publication with the most concentrated collection of alternative renditions of this poem is: Eliot Wienberger and Octavio Paz, NINETEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT WANG WEI, Mt. Kisco: Moyer Bell, 1987. There is an adaptation (the end point of examples 8 & 9) in my own INK BAMBOO (reference above), p. 30.

For the transliteral examples, I give World Wide Web references where the reader should be able to find, as here though with the possibility of my adding further features and modification, a complete demonstration of the transliteral processes. The transliteral phases are marked from 0 to F (numbers 10 to 15 are represented by letters A-F as in the hexadecimal system). Beside the example number, I give the 'href'. However in each case this should be prefixed with 'http://www.demon.co.uk/ eastfield/in/' so that, for example 2, the complete URL is: http://www.demon.co.uk/ eastfield/in/ translit/ transp13.html.

Please note also that even the Web versions present only the record of a single performance of the transliteral process - from a large number of possible performances - since there are quasi-random factors during actual text generation which produce indeterminate results each time the transliteration is run. (I may be able to add live text generation to the Web version in due course.)

<14>
In at least two places - 'On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,' (LaS) in ONE-WAY STREET, London: Verso, 1979, pp. 107-123 (written in 1916 and unpublished during his lifetime) and 'On the Task of the Translator,' (TT) in ILLUMINATIONS, London: Fontana, 1973, pp. 69-82 (first published 1923) - Walter Benjamin sets out arguments concerning language which can be read as a reconciliation or (to align with Benjamin's theological mode in these works) redemption of 'free' or 'deep' interpretative translation and the forms of transliteration and transcription which I advocate in these notes.

Despite an apparent or surface logocentrism, I read Benjamin as developing a fully materialist, literalist, proto-grammatological philosophy of language, where the 'language-as-such' of (even mute, inanimate) things guarantees the only meaningful sense of 'translatability,' (i.e. there is only translation because language-as-such is, as Benjamin puts it, the 'mental being' of things) and this language is distinct from human languages (systems of signs 'agreed by some convention' to communicate meanings/information about things and experience).

This groundwork allows Benjamin to write some extraordinary and, I would argue, useful and accurate things about translation. For, if the task and faith(fulness) of the translator is founded on language-as-such which is (directly and without mediation) the substantial 'mental' existence of things, then, in so far as translation engages language-as-such, it may embrace 'nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages issuing from matter' (LaS, p. 122), and it may require a 'literalness' which is nothing to do with communicative or conventional meaning, but is at one with a (mystical/materialist) conception of language which 'knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication.' (LaS, p. 111) For Benjamin, if a translation manages to demonstrate the translatability of an original then, in fact, it 'ironically, transplants the original into a more definitive realm of language since it can no longer be displaced by a secondary rendering.' (TT, p. 75) But what interests me most, is the suggestive potential of the materiality of Benjamin's language-as-such when it operates in relation to a practice of translation: 'Translation attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language ... can be considered as a translation of all the others. By the relation ... of languages as between media of varying densities, the translatability of languages is established. TRANSLATION IS REMOVAL FROM ONE LANGUAGE INTO ANOTHER THROUGH A CONTINUUM OF TRANSFORMATIONS. TRANSLATION PASSES THROUGH CONTINUA OF TRANSFORMATION, NOT ABSTRACT AREAS OF IDENTITY AND SIMILARITY. (LaS, p. 117, my emphases; I'm reading the latter part of this sentence as negating abstraction and not identity or similarity per se.)

Benjamin's terminology - for example, his free use of a vocabulary of 'mental essences' and underlying INTENTIO (to stand for his preferred mode of translation's direct relation to language-as-such, TT, p. 78-79) - may appear as if allied to the geography of essentialisms which we threw into question at the beginning of these notes. His argument may sometimes seem to approximate the conventional abstraction which he so strongly opposes. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of his thinking combined with a practice informed by an applied grammatological understanding of letters and their arrangement in tables(/aux) of textual performance: this is a close translation of the language-as-such which underlies my own work in these notes and the pieces they frame.

.

Referring to literal proximities and attractions through sequences, I want to record the following 'lab note'. In an early version of the transliteral algorithm, if a letter in the source text was not the same as the letter in the corresponding position of the target text, then it would be immediately replaced by another letter in the ordered sequence of letters, whether or not it NEEDED all the remaining phases of the transliteration to move the required number of steps through the sequence to reach the target letter. This meant that the first phase away from the source text would make replacements of nearly all the source's letters (except for the very small number already in 'final' positions). The literal surface of the text would be transformed utterly, as if by an immediate and strong attraction to the 'other'. This strikes me as an analogy for a particular approach to translation where, figuratively, the exotic is felt to be an immediate pull. I preferred - and the reasons behind this do deserve examination - to implement what I think of as a more balanced and symmetrical version of the algorithm, where letters only NECESSARILY change if they have to (i.e. if all the remaining phases are required to arrive at the target letter through the sequence), otherwise the probability of the letter being replaced is proportional to the distance of the target letter, in the context of the remaining phases. Attraction to one or other end of the transliteral process increases in inverse proportion to distance - gravity-style, in a curved space of letters.

<15>
Homeophonic translation has been explored by a number of writers, including, famously, Louis Zukofsky, in his versions of CATULLUS. Recently Robert Kelly published, with elliptical comments on the process, a fascinating version of a Höderlin poem, 'Patmos,' or 'Path Moss' in Kelly's rendition, see: CHAIN, 4 (Fall 1997) pp. 109-116; and Richard Caddel includes homeophonic workings of the Welsh poem, 'Gododdin,' in one of the sections of his 'For the Fallen' partially published in FRAGMENTE, 7 (1997) pp. 85-93 and discussed in the same issue by Harry Gilonis, 'Making music out of language: Richard Caddel's "reading" of the GODODDIN,' pp. 94-108.

<17>
Some discussion of my own work with mesostics may be found in 'Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext.' VISIBLE LANGUAGE, 30.2 (Spring/Summer, 1996) pp. 164–83. Others who have worked with mesostics and similar techniques include Williams, Mac Low and Cage. See, for example: Emmett Williams, A VALENTINE FOR NOEL: Four Variations on a Scheme, Barton, Brownington, Berlin: Something Else Press, 1973 and also his SELECTED SHORTER POEMS (1950-1970), New York: New Directions, 1975. A selection of Jackson Mac Low's 'Asymmetries' is included in his REPRESENTATIVE WORKS: 1938–1985, New York: Roof Books, 1986. His 'diastic' technique was used in THE VIRGINIA WOOLF POEMS, Providence: Burning Deck, 1985. Cage's mesostics include ROARATORIO: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (first produced in Paris in 1978) and I-VI, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. There is interesting discussion of these works (although not of Mac Low) in Marjorie Perloff, RADICAL ARTIFICE, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991, especially chapters 5 and 7.

<18>
A screen shot from: John Cayley, AN ESSAY ON THE GOLDEN LION, London: Wellsweep, 1994 (disk for Apple Macintosh and Hypercard). A paper edition was also produced by Edinburgh: Morning Star, 1995 in its 'Under the Moon' series.

<19>
A screen shot from: John Cayley, OISLEAND, London: Wellsweep, 1996 (disk for Apple Macintosh and Hypercard). Bold letters in the upper text spell out the Irish line below. This piece will also be included on a CD Rom anthology of electronic poetry, Diane Greco ed., BEHIND THE LINES, Cambridge MA: Eastgate, 1999 (forthcoming).

<20>
When I drafted the paragraph above, I included parentheses which indicated that I believe that the overtly semantic component of a text and translation is foregrounded, predominantly, for reasons which are a function of literary privilege and critical prejudice. These are pathologies which poetry has an obligation to question. I also suggested that, in many instances of conventional translation, the semantic mesostic is 'haphazard' (in part because it is divorced from the letter) but that this is regarded as a sign of the 'magisterial' in criticism associated with conventional translation. This literal analysis of translation processes is a practical challenge to this haphazard prejudice.

<21>
See Gregory Ulmer, APPLIED GRAMMATOLOGY, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985; and his 'The Miranda Warnings: an experiment in hyperrhetoric,' in George Landow ed., HYPER/TEXT/THEORY, John Hopkins University Press, 1994; and also a recent response he has written to a web-based hypertext by Michael Joyce: 'A Response to Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce,' POST MODERN CULTURE, 9 (1997) http://www.press.jhu.edu/ journals/ postmodern_culture/ (pmc is a web-based refereed journal, now available by subscription, although a text-only version can be browsed freely).

<22>
The end point here is an excellent translation by Arthur Cooper, variously published in AGENDA 12.2 (Summer 1974) p. 53; in his THE CREATION OF THE CHINESE SCRIPT, London: The China Society, 1978, p. 40; and finally in his uncollected translations, THE DEEP WOODS' BUSINESS, London: Wellsweep, 1990, p. 30.

<24>
More phases are shown for this example. However, this is also a selection. The introduction of special characters means that a greater number of phases is needed to complete the transliteration. Here, I give 16 out of 24 phases.