Not So Fast, English...

Another "Postcards" dummy spread

In the recent post Postcards 4 I had a little snarky fun at the expense of the introduction to Luigi Ghirri's Kodachrome, a book which is otherwise Holy Writ to me. As I suggested there, this was a very Anglo-Saxon response to the sort of involuted linguistic constructions that characterise "continental" philosophising in general. Even better, the translation was truly awful, and what is more amusing than the stumblings of non-native speakers? Hey, listen, I've tried speaking French in Paris and German in Berlin, not to mention Russian in St. Petersburg and Spanish in Barcelona, and my cheeks still burn with the humiliation. Yeah, yeah, very funny... Wait until you visit London, mate.

Nonetheless, as a person whose self-regard rests largely on a capacity for understanding language, in all its abused, elevated, or hyperventilated states, I dislike failing to understand a piece of writing that is clearly intended to be enlightening. So, let's give it another go. What was Piero Berengo Gardin really trying to say?

Now, even the best translations are fraught with cross-cultural misunderstandings, and simple errors. A couple of years ago, for example, as described in the post Gigantic Arabs, I found that the translator of some letters published in 1908 had mistaken "arbres" (trees) for "arabes" (arabs), resulting in the curiously Freudian sentence, "So there is nothing to do but deplore my sex and return to dreams of Italy and Spain. Granada! Gigantic Arabs, pure sky, brooks, rose laurels, sun, shadow, peace, calm, harmony, and poetry!" And let's not revisit the ill-feeling that certain attempts to translate that exhortation of George Clinton of Funkadelic, "free your mind, and your ass will follow", caused at my Innsbruck residency (see Lost in Translation). Let's accept that translation is hard, and see what can be done about it.

So, for the non-bilingual, the key to understanding poor translation is the bilingual dictionary. Not in the obvious sense that you can look up unknown words, but in the sense that you can reverse-engineer someone else's shoddy work, by finding the linguistic "false friends" and simple errors that may have led them down strange paths, when they looked something up in the dictionary (or, more likely, didn't).

Here are the two translated passages [1] from the introduction to Kodachrome that I quoted:

The elements composing the work are a large quantity of communication data and a large quantity of ambiguity. While the communication data are direct and immediate, the ones of the ambiguity are mediate by the presence of a very important element: the time going by and its progressive consumption till the limit point of the image congealment and its cancellation.

And:

The Author, paging its picture-cards lets a large white space around the image. To all people asking the reason of a so algid, iconographical isolation I answer, in agreement with the Author, that the photograph has been deprived of a superfluos [sic] space. I mean the one where it is collected and filed the direct, explicit datum. The subtraction of this space is so corresponding to the cancellation of any possible presumption of truth.

Hmm. My Italian is poor, but I know enough to make a close comparison and, more importantly, I know enough Artspeak to penetrate Berengo Gardin's intentions, bearing in mind this was written in 1978, when even God was still scratching his head over the latest issue of Tel Quel. For a start, one very basic word that occurs frequently is cartolina, translated as "picture-card". Well, I think we already know what a cartolina is: it's a postcard! Which, if nothing else, suggests my own "postcards" project is on the right track. But what about "congealment"? In English, the verb "to congeal" has a quite specific meaning, and some unpleasant associations: it's what blood does as it dries, or fatty food does as it cools and sticks to the pan. It's not a word you associate with photographs (unless, I suppose, you're a wet-plate fanatic). So what, according to the dictionary, does congelamento actually mean? It seems it means "freezing". Aha! We have uncovered a "false friend"! Similarly, consumazione does not mean "consumption" (consumo in Italian), but – setting aside its more common, touristic meaning of "food or drink that one orders in a public establishment" – it means "consummation" or, I suspect, something not unlike the commercial term "fulfilment". Light begins to dawn.

As well as numerous dictionaries, the Web has gifted us various indispensable linguistic tools, chief among which I'd count Google Translate and Linguee. Translate is a blunt instrument, but surprisingly effective: its rendering of these two Italian passages is pretty good, if literal, and far superior to the original published versions. [2] The advantage of Linguee is that it gives multiple real-world contexts for a word or expression, which is like having an experienced interpreter at your elbow. As in English, it seems congelamento (freezing) and immagine (image) frequently occur together: it's what happens when you're watching a streamed video, for example: the picture freezes. More light!

But: to paraphrase the Incredible String Band's Hedgehog Song, we may know all the words, and have sung all the notes, but what in the name of Roland Barthes does it all mean?

I think this starts to become clearer once you realise "cancellation" (or "deletion", "striking out", "erasure") in the first passage refers back to time, and not to the photograph. He means that of the two major elements he identifies in the work as a whole –  its visual "data" and its ambiguity – the former retains its "indexical" significance (a tree still looks like a tree) but the latter is compounded by the freezing of a moment in time. Some situation was happening in and through time in front of the camera, but – once captured or "frozen" – we no longer have the information that would tell us, unambiguously, what it was, or what it became. We have a mystery, but no plot-line.

Similarly, in the second extract, he sets up a straw man, who says, "So what's with all the white space around the postcards?" ("algid", incidentally, despite being a lazy rendering of algido, is a fairly obscure technical English word, meaning "cool, chilly"). The point, he seems to be saying, is that by embodying photography's removal of "superfluous" space (that is, the omission of everything outside the picture's frame) the white space emphasises the photograph's inherent truncation from any "truth value" we might naively presume it to have. We have a stage-set, but no play.

Or something like that. These are typical early skirmishes in the Theory Wars, and an attack on "grand narratives" and such. In the late 1970s this sort of hand-waving towards profundities that might, translated into blunt Anglo-Saxon terms, seem no more than statements of the bleedin' obvious was still very much a work in progress. I know, I was there. So how far did Luigi Ghirri (l'autore) understand or endorse the verbal flights his work had stimulated? Pretty much all the way, I'd say. Ghirri himself was a thoughtful, articulate writer, with a philosophical bent. When Berengo Gardin writes, "in agreement with the Author", this is no rhetorical flourish. Ghirri's Complete Essays 1973-1991 (Mack, 2016) are well worth reading, and the book happens to contain a decent re-translation of his own foreword to Kodachrome, which includes these words:

So I am not interested in images and "decisive moments", the analysis of language in and of itself, aesthetics, the concept or all-consuming idea, the emotion of the poet, the erudite quotation, the search for a new aesthetic creed, or the use of a style. My duty is to see with clarity, and this is why I am interested in all possible functions – without separating any of them out, but taking them on as a  whole, in order to be able, from time to time, to see the hieroglyphs I have encountered and make them recognisable.
[Per questo non mi interessano: le immagini e i momenti decisivi, lo studio o l'analisi del linguaggio fine a se stesso, l'estetica, il concetto o l'idea totalizzante, l'emozione del poeta, la citazione colta, la ricerca di un nuovo credo estetico, l'uso di uno stile.
Il mio impegno è vedere con chiarezza, per questo mi interessano tutte le funzioni possibili, senza separarne nessuna, ma assumerle globalmente per potere di volta in volta, vedere e rendere riconoscibili i geroglifici incontrati.]

Which is still a little obscure, certainly, but interesting, and yet I'd go so far as to say the photographs are actually rather better than that. In fact, they would seem to contradict almost every word he has written about what he is not interested in. But, as that reluctant, recusant Anglo-Saxon D.H. Lawrence said: never trust the teller, trust the tale.

Another "Postcards" dummy spread

1. Here are the original Italian versions:

Gli elementi del lavoro sono una grande quantità di dati di comunicazione e una grande quantità di ambiguità. Mentre i dati della comunicazione sono diretti e immediati quelli dell'ambiguità sono mediati dalla presenza di un elemento importante, il passare del tempo e la sua consumazione progressiva fino al punto limite del congelamento dell'immagine o della sua cancellazione.

L'autore, impaginando le proprie cartoline lascia molto spazio bianco attorno all'immagine. A tutti coloro che si chiedono il perchè di un tale algido isolamento iconografico rispondo, d'accordo con l'autore, che alla fotografia è stato sottratto uno spazio superfluo, quello, cioè, dove si raccoglie e deposita il dato diretto, esplicito. Alla sottrazione di questo spazio corrisponde dunque la cancellatura di ogni possibile presunzione di verità.

2. Here are Google Translate's versions:

The elements of the work are a large amount of communication data and a large amount of ambiguity. While the communication data are direct and immediate those of ambiguity are mediated by the presence of an important element, the passage of time and its progressive consumption up to the limit point of the freezing of the image or its cancellation.

The author, by paginating his postcards, leaves a lot of white space around the image. To all those who wonder why such an icy iconic isolation I reply, in agreement with the author, that a superfluous space has been subtracted from photography, that is, that is, where the direct, explicit data is collected and deposited. The removal of this space therefore corresponds to the cancellation of any possible presumption of truth.