David Stephens in Translation

This is a talk I gave today at the Center for Art in Wood in Old City Philadelphia. I am grateful to artist, writer, and curator Robin Rice for the invitation and for the chance to talk about an artist I greatly admire.

I'm posting my speaking notes, and if time permits, I'll go through and add more images and hyperlinks to connect the somewhat loosely structured essay to other ideas. ~gerard

David Stephen, Cenotaph T.O.B.B. (Tower of Brothers' Blood), 2009-2012, painted wood, 108 x 144 x 72 in. 

David Stephens in Translation

Gerard Brown

Presented at “David Stephens: A Colloquy”

Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia PA

Robin Rice, Chairperson

March 22, 2014

I’ve been invited to talk about David Stephens’ sculpture in relation to translation. In preparation for writing about his work in the gallery guide for this exhibit, I went to David Stephens’ studio in late December and asked him how one could utterly misunderstand his work. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that one could ignore the fact that it is to be read.

I began to entertain the idea that the list of materials in his work should possibly be more elaborate than it is. The guide describes the sculpture and installations in the show as being made of ‘painted wood’ and I suggest that they should possibly be described as being made of painted wood and language.

Stephens’s work is covered in thick coats of language. For me, this calls to mind historian Steven Roger Fisher’s descriptions of the ancient world as covered in writing that declared the power and wealth of its ruling class to an almost illiterate public. Rogers challenges the myth of a ‘literate’ ancient world (67), pointing out that in a typical Greek household, the only person who could read was likely to be a slave who read to her master or mistress (55). This description of a world filled with language that could not be read (unless, ironically, by those who lacked freedom) echoes the experience of being in the gallery with Stephens’ work. The fact that David Stephens uses language in such a way that its meaning is not transparent appears to call for some sort of translation. Or does it?

            In her book on translation, Susan Bassnet describes three forms of translation – interlingual (the most common form – one which carries a text from one language to another), intralingual (one that translated within a given language, such as the translations of literature from one period or region into the idioms of another), and intersemiotic translation (in which the work is translated across signifying systems, such as between literature and visual art) (14).

            It would appear that Stephens, whose Braille writing stands for words in English, would be engaged in intralingual translation. This act is sometimes called re-Englishing and happens all the time in varying degrees of inventiveness. Romeo and Juliette was updated and transported to mid-20^th century New York by Arthur Laurents as West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins might be seen as intersemiotic translators who helped move the drama into music and dance) and the Star Wars screen plays are being backdated and transported to Victorian England by Ian Doescher.

Anyone who spends time on translation will be happy to talk about the problems that occur when a text is moved through time or across language borders, and most of those problems involve the use of idioms. Idioms give us a chance to see how strange something is and how far it needs to travel between languages. To keep things simple, we’ll start with an example that’s interlingual (between two languages). Every semester in high school classrooms across America, the French greeting ça va is translated in to the English salutation hello, despite the fact that it more literally means “it goes” (or when inflected in speech, “[how does] it go?”). Students are taught to respond, Ça va bien merci (or, literally, “It goes well, thank you”) and all of this maps pretty well on to the English exchange How’s it going? It’s going well, thank you. The world spins madly on and no one really cares that these acts of interpretation (which is different from translation in that its material is spoken, not written language) are all being played with approximations.

The trick is when we get to translation, which deals with written language. You are reading a French text and one character says to another, Ça va. But the characters are not social equals, the greeting is being spoken by an employee to her supervisor. How’s it going? and its cognates, like how goes it? seem too informal, so you choose to translate the greeting as hello or even good morning to keep from making the reader feel like the French idiom has somehow changed the interaction of characters and to meet the needs of readers for whom you’re translating.

            We need to concentrate on the act David Stephens’ writing. Occurring in English, the only thing that prevents its immediate legibility is the script in which it is written – Braille. Idiom has nothing to do with it. If you walk over to one of the sculptures and start reading, you find what he wrote – lists of names, texts with scriptural allusions. Braille is a specific form of writing, originally developed 1824 and refined over time for greater ease of use and to fulfill specific functions (there is a specific system of Braille writing for the representation of mathematic symbols and equations, for example). One can write in Braille by means of a stylus and slate, and machines for typing and printing publications have been developed over the nearly two centuries that it has been in use (“Braille”). Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Braille has become a common part of the visual landscape in this country.

            While Braille is an important means of providing access to written text to those who cannot see it, its use has declined precipitously in recent years (Aziz). Its status as writing is not itself universally accepted. Author Charles Mann describes Braille as a representation of writing (“a translation of writing on paper”) rather than a form of writing (1651). Nor is Braille, though it is capable of encoding other languages, a foreign language in and of itself. In this context, it’s best understood as a script developed to meet the needs of a community of English speaking readers and writers.

            What does it mean to regard a text that’s in your own language as foreign enough to imply the need for translation? Doesn’t such a behavior indicate a kind of other-ing of the blind? Braille-dependent reader Georgina Klege writes of her experiences reading in public:

If my braille reading prompts comment it is evidence that the blind, like other disabled people are still invisible in mainstream American life. Our habits and paraphernalia remain unfamiliar and exotic. Blind people continue to be excluded from the educational and employment opportunities which would give them access to the sort of academic and literary venues where they would need to read in public.

There are a few dangers here. One is that Braille might be ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ to sighted audiences (despite its aforementioned presence in the visual landscape) and that its strangeness might invite careless metaphors. Klege spends a good deal of her time discussing Ann Hamilton’s well-intentioned installation in the 1999 Venice Biennale and how, by using Braille for symbolic purposes, Hamilton (perhaps unwittingly) equated blindness with ignorance (215).

In the context of this exhibition, the clear and present danger of seeing Braille as a form of language that requires translation is its equation of people in our own culture with foreign ‘Others’ and the concurrent failing to recognize a common language we share. The ‘unfamiliar and exotic’ code distracts through its surface representation. What is at issue in Stephens’ work is not translation, but encryption. There is an old stand-by claim about translation that if you give a poem to ten translators you’ll get ten different poems back. If you walk over to David’s work and read it, you get back exactly what he wrote. Encryption relies on the ability to pass information clearly – if in a code - between parties while introducing as little room for (mis)interpretation as possible.

            David concern that viewers might not recognize the writing in his work was actually a strategy of the ancient Greeks who sought to transmit secret messages through hostile territory by concealing them under layers of wax on wooden tablets. When the messenger was stopped there might be an innocuous message on the wax tablet that would be melted off when it reached its intended audience. This practice is called steganography, or ‘hidden writing’ (Singh, 5).

            By moving between back and forth between literature to sculpture, David Stephens may engage in an act of intersemiotic translation, coloring the meaning of his texts through the act of inscribing them on his work and shaping our reading of them by embodying them powerful physical forms. In this way, he is more like the concrete poets of the late 19^th and early 20^th century (or the poets who use ‘figured’ or shaped techniques described by Dick Higgins or Charles Boultenhouse). That’s up for debate, and would be another panel discussion altogether.

In my opinion, what needs to be translated in David Stephens’ work is not the language itself, but the way his highly idiosyncratic and original acts of writing and sculpture sit in relation to culture in general – to religious cultures, African American culture, disability culture. For this reason, Stephens’ work requires much closer reading by scholars and critics fluent in its idioms and I look forward to that conversation when it comes.

Works cited

Aviv, Rachel. “Listening to Braille.” The New York Times. 20 Dec 2009. 17 Feb 2014. < http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>

Bassnet, Susan. Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 1980.

"Braille." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. <http://www.britannica.com.libproxy.temple.edu/EBchecked/topic/77257/Braille>.

Boultenhouse, Charles. “Poems in the Shape of Things”. Art News Annual. 1959. 65-83.

Fisher, Steven Roger. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion, 2005.

Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.

Kleege, G. “Visible Braille/Invisible Blindness”. Journal of Visual Culture. 2006, v. 5. P.209. 17 Feb 2014. < http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/5/2/209>

Mann, Charles. “Cracking the Khipu Code.” Science. 13 Jun 2003. 17 Feb 2014. http://www.charlesmann.org/articles/Khipu-Science.pdf.

Singh, Simon. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. New York, Anchor, 1999.