Violins, violence, translation: looking outwards.

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy taking contemporary art as a starting-point to define translation, we set off on a fascinating journey through disciplines which do not contradict each other but improve each other. Thus we can see, with this transversality among disciplines, that “each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way” (Hofstadter 2007, 252), that we are strange loops where everything is interrelated and this gives us “a deeper and subtler vision of what it is to be human” (ibid., 361). On this journey, our aim is to find out what translation does: and what it does is, or should be, reveal those invisible worlds lying behind texts; see what texts say without saying; show the walls others have built, walls which are sometimes obvious, but at other times show the most dangerous walls, those that are not visible. Translation should be able to resist essentialisms, binary oppositions and the stagnation of the universal. Translation as a way of giving the other back the right to look.