What are the risks and possibilities when translating work from primary to secondary audiences? 

 

Perhaps I was asked this question because academics are expected to “translate” complex texts and images into a language understandable to––well, whatever secondary audience is there: students, a general audience, or readers. The scholar, one sometimes assumes, creates explanatory equivalents of primary sources, textual or visual. The contextual, formal and gestational accounts of a work of art exhaust the possibilities of explanation. I’m not happy thinking of even part of my job this way but I’ll make a stab at answering the question.

Risks: If I do translate, what might happen instead is that my “translation” will make the primary source look like an illustration of the translation. That is, the textual source (a Platonic dialog) or visual source (a painting by Kandinsky) can come to seem like an elaboration on, or an instance of, a paragraph or two that purports to be an explanation or description of it.

Possibilities: On the other hand, translation has the potential to help the source speak to an audience, a time, or a set of circumstances that it could not speak to before. Jacques Derrida made Plato speak to an audience of the 1980s; and TJ Clark made Courbet speak to an audience just emerging from the failed revolutions of the 1960s. My “translation” may be a web of words that encloses the “meaning” of the primary source; it may be visual, a drawing, an example of the primary source––or of something to which source once spoke, or should have spoken.

But why use the word “translation” for what is really a hermeneutical practice? Do we translate when we speak to one another, or do we interpret? It seems to me that the function of us “translators” is more like that of a loud speaker, which brings a work from those who hear it first to those who hear it later: the “sound check” of an Occupy Wall Street, or perhaps a printing press.

Here there is no “primary” and “secondary.” If the secondary audience is to understand the primary text, it will have to make this work its own, and it will then remain primary. Perhaps it is better to think of the “translator” as an impersonator of the source, someone who embodies the source temporarily until the source, and the audience, can speak to one another independently. The danger here is that students are prone to confuse their teacher with the subject. Without separation between impersonator and source, the source never speaks for itself. That is what failure looks like.

Similarly, socially engaged art must strive to stay “primary.” Thomas Hirschhorn’s recent installation, Gramsci Monument (2013), did not translate Gramsci into a large architectural structure and into images, lectures and performances, for the benefit of the “secondary audience” in the Forest Houses housing project. The installation instead brought Gramsci into a conversation by commandeering people to speak with one another around and with his texts. If this process succeeds, we are all primary audiences.

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About the contributor: Margaret Olin is a Senior Research Scholar with appointments at Yale Divinity School as well as the Department of Religious Studies, the Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of the History of Art. From 1986 until her arrival at Yale in 2009 she was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies. Her most recent book is Touching Photographs (Chicago, 2012). She is also co-editor, with Robert S. Nelson, of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago, 2003). With Steven Fine, Vivian B. Mann, and Maya Balakirsky-Katz, she co-edits the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. In 2012 she curated the multi-venue exhibition Shaping Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv at Yale University, to which she contributed the photographic installations “Urban Bricolage” and “No Carry Zone.” divinity.yale.edu/olin