Fragments d'un discours amoureux

21 ♓︎

[chaosophia218]

“Tracks made by atomic particles from a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up the particles. The eye can’t see protons, electrons, and other subatomic particles, but a camera records their frothy wakes in a chamber of liquefied neon and hydrogen at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Physicists study the tracks to learn about the characteristics of the particles that produced them.” - National Geographic, 1978.

[389]

One of the iwan ceilings of Fatima Masumeh Shrine in atabki sahn, Qom, Iran

[sentimentalbeing2001]

Born to love and be loved

[metmuseum]

Plaque of St. John. 12th century. Credit line: Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/464585

[thesilicontribesman]

Neolithic Star Shaped Mace Head, found near Laurencekirk, Montrose Museum, Angus

[lovertm]

[excitementshewrote]

[vagarezas-deactivated20241018]

Os dias felizes estão entre as árvores, como os pássaros: viajam nas nuvens, correm nas águas, desmancham-se na areia. Todas as palavras são inúteis, desde que se olhe para o céu. A doçura maior da vida flui na luz do sol, quando se está em silêncio.

Cecilia Meireles

[xanaxfarts]

Ana Mendieta: Siluetas Series (1973)

[alienestrangement]

blood and organs burst from truck in Netherlands

[exitwound]

the aftermath

[sexartdesigncrime]

Brian Eno’s graphic notation for Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1979)

[nemfrog]

Anatomical wax model. Florence. Late 18th century. Wellcome Library, London.

[thingsfromthedirt]

blindfolded couple (ca. 1950)

[dvrknessabides]

Mammatus Clouds over Calgary shot on film, 2024

[hologramparade]

Vashti Bunyan - Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind (Singles and Demos 1964 - 1967)

[matilda-aseo-deactivated2025043]

it always bothers me, this fixation on defining what The Real Translation should be like, as if a work came into being with the Real Translation already hidden in it for the translator to uncover. but it's a fixation that, annoying as it is, makes sense as it is rooted in how the translation industry operates: unless the work is a classic, there simply won't be more than one translation as the publisher with rights to the book would create competition for their own product, and so capitalism hinders translation not just in making the One translation worse by making the translator work on a minimal budget under high pressure, but also by limiting us from thinking translation further, from viewing it as a way of engaging with a text, which can render visible different readings, different approaches, rather than how to let the reader erroneously believe translation is a neutral process in which the translator is at best tangentially involved

[marxism-ex-silium]

In addition to this, when thinking about the effect of capitalism and IP law on translation work its important to also expand it out to a wider scope and consider how it mixes with imperialism and linguistic imperialism specifically.

Not only do IP laws restrict how often a text can be translated, it also restricts where the translations can be done. Who can afford to buy the rights to a text to translate it will effect which languages it will be transmitted into. Which naturally feeds into the question of: which languages are spoken by the people who have accumulated the most capital in the last few centuries? Naturally, that leaves one at the imperial-core who have also, due to other results of imperialism, spread their languages the furthest which compounds the issue as more speakers = larger market = greater profitability = greater incentivisation for translation investment.

There are of course the odd exceptions to this rule, Dutch perhaps being the first to come to mind as a imperial culture and language that unlike English, French, or Spanish remains small and is its own victim of Anglo-linguistic imperialism internally, but i digress for it is still more provided for than other languages with a similar speaking population such as Sundanese or Nepali.

But to return to the topic of hand, Capitalism, IP law, and imperialism not only work to keep which transactions are done a low quality (as OP points out very well) but also work to restrict the very languages that an author can be made manifest in a way that ultimately reflects the last centuries of imperialism and capital accumulation within the Imperial Core.

[achillesinhighheels]