I forget what book I read this in, but some translator, in their introduction to something, spoke of the two ways of translating: one is to be as faithful to the original as possible, the other is to attempt to interpret the meaning, and to render that meaning as closely as possible using not only translations of words, but also turns of speech, subtext, etc etc. Two recent projects by Los Angeles based musicians explore these alternate modes of translation.
Taking the more literal route, James Klopfleisch’s series of works grouped together as Documentary Songs of the True American Teenager is a live-transcription of audio recordings of some kid telling stories. The stories are full of all manner of zany antics, many of which are too explicit to mention here. Klopfleisch listens to the stories on headphones, relaying them back as he hears them, while simultaneously using a bow to coax noise out of a milk carton.
At first, this was somewhat perplexing, but what he’s doing is performing not the story for the sake of the story, but rather a performance of a recording. Hence, the bowed noise from the milk carton is in fact a literal translation of the low-quality audio recording’s digital noise into a performed action. One would imagine that many of these far-fetched stories include copious amounts of material drawn from stories the teller heard from others, urban legends and whatnot. So in a sense, Klopfleisch is making visible the chain of telephone in which he has become a distanced participant.
OK I lied. Julia Holter’s “phonetic translations” don’t have anything to do with either of the senses of translation mentioned above. It’s utter nonsense. Relaying the sounds of Russian words in videos found on Youtube into English, and creating songs out of them, she’s obliterated any sense of what the original meaning might have been. She has, however, retained that sense of bewildering confusion that someone who is unfamiliar with a foreign language gets when listening to the language, only intensified because one is startled to find that in fact the words one is hearing are in fact familiar. A favorite moment of mine is when one of the women who appears around 5 ½ minutes in, when after hearing the word “piñatas” repeatedly, suddenly clutches onto a chandelier, and turns around and repeats “piñatas”. Holter performed these downtown at The Standard during some sort of circus-sounding event called “The Series”. Video here.