Babel as a positive de-construction (Chloe)
With Pax Babeliana, Omar Berrada invites us to re-examine the concept of Babel as a process of reconstruction. Starting from images of ruins, he ends his poem on evocations of construction works (“the trace”, “your foundation”, “sous les pavés, l’asphalte”, “we are the earth”). From ruins, he constructs a reversed building, starting from the top and down till the earth. He creates a positive image of deconstruction: not so much as a curse from God but as a creative potential. Languages are juxtaposed – and perfectly mastered by the performer -, regardless of their reading direction. Languages are at peace. French and Arab can be read in a same sentence, even if they are written in opposite directions (from left to right and right to left). Babel becomes a positive process of deconstructing the hegemony of a language, as underlined by Antena in her Manifesto for Interpretation as Instigation. The interpreter is “an instigator because we actively work to demolish languages hierarchies as they become real in space and time.” (p.5) This deconstruction is seen as enriching the text, rather than producing a loss. Antena claims what we already stated in class: the translator is a creator.
Those works are hoping for a reconciliation between languages, across cultures, and I would say that the Emoji Dick project aims at reconciling two registers of languages: high and low, literary and popular ways of speaking. In her article, Jennifer Kronovet recalls this common distinction between the everyday words and the written ones. Bliss’ language aimed at erasing this distinction in proposing a language that couldn’t be spoken while derived from popular and conventional pictograms. Emoji Dick challenges the supremacy of high standard English – and literary classics – in showing that such a work can exist in a more “popular” form. That this emoji language has become part of the younger generations daily vocabulary and as such, can be used as a language in itself. The project is quite revealing on the process of translation, for the reader can see, on each line, the way of thinking of the various translators. It sometimes resonates with our own way of thinking, sometimes not at all. It says a lot about how translation is about rendering the gist of the text, not merely mimicking it. With the emoji, one could have expected a simple illustration of the text, almost reproduced as riddles. The translators instead simultaneously transformed Emojis into a real language and highlighted the creative process of translating.