Ronkainen, Jonika 3/14 Comments

 Cooperson’s Intro:

    I loved the way Cooperson framed the author’s play with language as tooling with a linguistic memory of the eternal – it feels like the call for the reader to learn how to read what is inarticulable in direct terms, and I really like that as a starting point for reading this kind of translation – that is, to read the memory of the original in the work – I really like the idea that the memory of the original might register itself negatively (in the sense of absence) in a translated text. I’d really like to think more about his description of language as “powerfully in excess of material reality” as I’m not quite sure which way he means it: if it is to gesture at an excess of material reality within material reality, or if it posits an immateriality of language, or whatever else if I’ve misfired in both of these interpretations. And further, his description of this overwhelming the "agreed-upon relationship of word and object" – by which I would assume he means a sign–referent relationship, making signification the excess of language over material reality, which I don’t know that I agree with (or disagree with, to be clear). 

(Also, Cooperson pulled together a great assemblage of language-games quotes, big fan of that)

Impostures: 

    I think I almost liked Cooperson’s introduction so much that the actual work was bound to let me down, and it definitely did on my first read through. It was almost like because Cooperson had such a good theory of how to do the translation, the translation couldn’t rise to the level of the theory because it would be a perfect translation, but only for an audience of one (or the set of people who would be reading in this in English, with the same knowledge of esoteric Arabic biblical referents – which I’m thinking is a pretty small group) because it didn’t sacrifice very much. While reading the first imposture, I wrote up a whole memorandum on how great it would be to have annotations or a side-by-side literal translation, googling “boghaleen” and “kippen” and some other words not to even get a glimpse of what the word meant within a full page of search results, only to find the glossary on the backend :) So I went for a second readthrough and now I think it’s great because it makes the sacrifice of convenient reading, meaning it’s not going to offer something for everyone (because not everyone is going to be keen to take up the inconvenience), but it can be everything for anyone (whomever is enticed to take up the inconvenience).