I was really interested in what Tiang brought up about the problem of intellectual public property (when they were talking about Chekov) especially when it comes to authors/creators who are no longer around, or who’s name alone essentially holds the rights to some thing. It reminded me of a lecture I listened to from a professor named Joan Copjec on the subject of public spaces, and specifically the city of Jerusalem: she said “Jerusalem is a city too full of sacred places, too full of the ancestral dead to make living easy. Life is sacrificed to the past and the ancestral others by whose dreams the living judge themselves. If the city is to become livable again… it will have to learn how to make emptiness appear again… Jerusalem’s fiercest battle is between the sacred and the semblant.” I don’t mean to contest that this is actually an adequate assessment of Jerusalem, and I know it’s a bit off topic, but I think it kind of sets up a way to think about the problem of dead authors retaining IP: that it is similary to place the sacred over the semblant. That is, that it gives too much status to the original over later forms, which I think wraps it back to what we’ve talked about with the stability of a text, and I think what she Copjec writes about needing to make nothingness appear again gets at a way to understand that instability – that when a work is full (sacred), it becomes untenable for something new to be made from it, but when a new emptiness is encountered (and hence also when the sacred is not winning over the semblant), it becomes a living text again. I also think it works into the what’s been brought up quite a few times with the “translation as a bridge” schema – what I wrote down from Tiang’s talk was that they called their position as a translator “standing between two cultures,” as a “uniting” position – I think Copjec’s discussion would place this in reverse, standing the two cultures as first essentially sharing a space (albeit an empty space), and translation would not be uniting these two disparate things, but grappling with the point of their division, making translation a bridge only in the sense that it inhabits a gap.
Tracy K. Smith:
The really subtle differences in the formatting of the poems in “My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree” is really interesting and I’d like to see how it compares to the formatting of the Chinese version. I also want to know more about the introduction she wrote -- is it typical for translators to write introductions? In any case, I liked having it
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