All translation is faithless to a degree, but it is largely an idealistic faithlessness, trying as best it can to keep something—anything!—of worth despite immense difficulty (and some would say pure impossibility). In this issue of OF ZOOS, we wonder what translation would look like shorn of such idealism, allowed to wander off. We imagine how a single creative work might dramatise or embody the process of changing form. By foregrounding the process just a little more than usual, we might learn something new about the act of creation, the nature of beauty. In a way, our eagerness to leave idealism leads us back to an idealism of a different kind, one that affirms the value, and even the joy, of creative failure.

 

Here, we encounter an American girl lost in Malaysia and Malay, trying desperately to fit in; a couple playing broken telephone with Du Fu; a pervading willingness to allow the machine to take over; an “insignificant” Japanese poet translated in 2016 with commentary from 2066; a hilarious tale of a brother-in-law with pancreatic cancer; a series of self-interventionist text messages; English-to-English; misreported Famous Old Men Poets; and a meditation on the underlying faithfulness of some oddly-translated Thai hymns. Some translations, faithlessly interpreting our theme, are even pretty straightforward. The languages used include German, Vietnamese, Romanian, Norwegian, Indonesian, and French; the writers and artists from at least ten different countries; and the resulting effect, we hope, stories and poems that continue to translate and multiply, without regard for propriety, in readers’ minds.

 

>>

<<