SPSL
Notes on Notes on Return
Notes On Return (2003) was developed over a two-year period, instigated by an invitation to participate in a group exhibition, ‘The Translator’s Notes,’ that took as its point of departure a quote from Jose Ortega y Gasset 1937 essay, ‘The Misery and Splendor of Translation’:
… speech is composed above all of silences. A person incapable of quieting many things would not be capable of talking. And each language is a different equation of statements and silences. All peoples silence some things in order to be able to say others. Otherwise, everything would be unsayable. From this we deduce the enormous difficulty of translation: in it one tries to say in a language precisely what that language tends to silence. But, at the same time, one glimpses a possible marvellous aspect of the enterprise of translating: the revelation of the mutual secrets that peoples and epochs keep to themselves and which contribute so much to their separation and hostility1.
Prior to this, I had happened upon a second-hand bilingual edition of a collection of poems, Forms of Distance (1994), by the Chinese poet in exile, Bei Dao. Struck by a particular poem, ‘Folding Procedure,’ I went on to make audio recordings of readings in English and Cantonese with my mother and father, each speaking the texts independently in both languages, and reciting them after each other, line by line, phrase by phrase, according to our differing degrees of fluency. A year later, I went back to the recordings, plotting the layering and to-and-fro movement of imperfect bilingual ‘speech melodies’ between three voices, eighteen tracks, and four speakers2.
One by one. The sounds. The sounds that move at a time stops. Starts again all but exceptions. Stop. Start. Starts. Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise. Broken Speech. One to one. At a time. Cracked tongue. Broken tongue. Pidgeon. Semblance of speech. Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before starts. About to. Then stops. Exhale swallowed to a sudden arrest. Rest. Without. Can do without rests. Improper to rest before begun even. Probation of rest. Without them all. Stop start. Where proper pauses were expected. But no more3.
In the meantime, I spent a month in Hong Kong filming intermittently with a digital video camera, recalling the abstract images, rhythms and silences of these poetic text(s), and attempting to translate these “by eye and by ear4” into a visual-poetic that listened and cautiously spoke back to the text, editing the footage several months later.
In trying to recall a certain poem, to translate forward from unrememory and language removed, a few words prevail; most fail me, or rather, I fail them…
Notes for awkward movements, trans: 1. Come back, go back, give back, get back; 2. Exchanges – game, if uneasy; 3. A dash, rush to fill it; 4. The space is a euphemism (unsaid); 5. Blankness, a palimpsest, again, rubbed smooth; 6. Nonplussed but speechful; 7. Brimful of noise; 8. Not lost but displaced5.
CONCRETE POETRY: TENSION OF THINGS – WORDS IN SPACE-TIME6
In Notes On Return, I navigate space and language to find a location, a place, via dislocations. I am ‘home’ and ‘away’ and somewhere else, looking for meanings in the coincidences across and between registers, performing ad lib translations between word, sound and image, glimpsed, heard and spoken. Reading, looking, speaking, and moving, I stumble to connect up the concrete and abstract, futures, pasts, future-presents, the could-be and the vanished. My gaze is sometimes so close as to be myopic. (Myopia – a common condition, in which distant objects cannot be seen sharply; myopia: a lack of foresight.) I scale heights with my eyes. I stare hard at water and watery panes, surfaces that appear soft, harsh and malleable, transparent, luminescent, opaque. I look back and backwards, to find a way forward; compelled to look closely to ‘see’, ‘everything’ eludes me. In a state of suspension, yet perpetual movement, edges and parameters bleed and soften. I get used to my vision being muddy, which shifts my attention to the textures of places, of voices, of wordlessness.
A refrain of repeated returns speaks to the movements and cycles of change in the tangible and intangible; nothing is fixed. In flux, I read my and others’ estrangement from a cultural past, my and others’ disorientation and isolation in the coterminous present. I recall the words and rhythms of concealment and retreat – leaping, secluding, hurling, deluding, stepping back – which re-cast my relation to familiar unfamiliars, to my dearest, distant, to distances, displaced. If what emerges is a somewhat mournful relationship to space, to places and people – absent but for the feet of a seated shopkeeper, and an elderly woman lying prone, head and body turned away – it is an undisclosed subtext of a sudden death, coinciding with my flight from Hong Kong, that colours the tone of this piece. Yet Notes On Return also speaks to an ongoing endeavour to negotiate the discordant simultaneity of histories, geographies, and cultures, and the impossibility of ‘return’; permitting difficulty, regret even, in the face of inevitable disconnections and discontinuities. The patient doubling, tripling and stumbling of tongues tail awkward and necessary transformations across unstable terrains, between generations, mediations ridden with silences and voids, that remember the comforts and wounds in translation, as intimacy across distance, which must come with departure.
Cats return to where they began
Battle fish Leap beyond clerical heavens And the soprano goes into seclusion
I return to where I began
Quixotic sand Hurls itself against window-glass That crowblack mask of cloud
Stones return to where they began
Dreams of good fortune Grow into trees towering skyward Like ink seeping into the map
Meanings return to where they began
The rainbow deluding this world Is a glorious person’s autobiography steps back in to childhood7
The above text is extracted from susan pui san lok, ‘Back Words’, in A – Y: Locating ‘British Chinese’ Art’, 2004, PhD thesis, University of East London (unpublished).
NOTES1 Jose Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Misery and Splendor of Translation,’ (1937) in Lawrence Venuti ed. The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.49-63. ‘The Translator’s’ Notes’ was curated by Irene Amore for Café Gallery Projects, London, 26 March – 20 April 2003.
2 Paul Hillier, ‘Introducton,’ in Hillier ed. Steve Reich: Writings On Music, 1965-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002), p.6. Hillier cites possible influences on Reich’s work, in particular his use of taped speech.
3 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley, LA, London: California UP, 2001), p.75.
4 Filmscript for Trinh T. Minh-ha, dir., Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), 108 mins, colour and b&w, in Trinh, Framer Framed (London: Routledge, 1992), p.80.
5 susan pui san lok, artist’s statement, ‘The Translator’s Notes,’ exhibition booklet, 2003.
6 “… graphic-phonetic function-relations… and the substantive use of space as an element of composition entertain a simultaneous dialectics of eye and breath, that together with the ideogramic synthesis of meaning, creates a verbivocovisual’ sensible totality, so that words and experience are held in a close phenomenological juxtaposition, formerly impossible.” Augusto de Campo, ‘CONCRETE POETRY, A Manifesto,’ AD (Architecture & Decoration), no.20, November – December, 1956, São Paulo, cited in Between Poetry and Painting (London: ICA, 1965) exhibition catalogue, p.73.
7 Bei Dao, ‘Folding Procedure,’ in Bei Dao trans. David Hinton, Forms of Distance (London: Anvil Press, 1994) pp.72-73.