A Translation of a Translation: Response to Brent Hayes Edwards

I begin with a quote from about midway through Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay, “The Taste of the Archive”:

It is easy enough to state that any cultural criticism must involve a form of translation . . . cultural criticism is necessarily always a translation of a translation, since any object of analysis, whether a novel or a dance or the simplest “everyday” gesture—the way you wear your hat—can already itself be defined as translation, on another level, if to translate in the most basic sense means to carry over content from one instance into another via interpretation. The risk, of course, in the possibility that everything can be defined as translation is that the term is eviscerated beyond utility into a synonym for culture itself.

At the risk of “eviscerating the term,” for my response I would like to plot some of the different points of translation that Edwards pores over and performs in this essay, because in it one encounters several sites of translation that function in resonant and overlapping ways. “A Taste of the Archive” presents an occasion to contemplate the complexity in which translation figures as a visual, linguistic, archival, rhetorical, and critical enterprise. The significance of translation for its multiple imbrications and manifold iterations occurs in at least two levels here. First, Edwards’s encounter with the archive and the subsequent urgency of deciphering the stubborn material he discovers. Second, Claude McKay’s translations (figurative, literary, cultural) of his experience in North Africa. Here I focus on the first because it provides not only a model of what translation entails but also introduces the practice as a performative act.

First, translation is explored here as an archival encounter, through discovery of the photograph in the McKay archive. In this section entitled “The taste of the archive,” the taste is precisely taste in that teasing sense of an introductory flavor intended to tempt the reader or the researcher into a more intimate relationship, an invitation that beckons for something more. Or, it is taste in the literal sense of a feeling that cannot quite be rendered. How do you describe the taste of the archive? Especially in the face of dead ends and what Edwards calls “recalcitrant artifacts, stubborn materials that resist translation.” If we are to borrow from the cooking and food analogies that the occasion of this conference invites, we know that it is not always easy to cook something in the same way it tastes. So what exactly do we taste in archival work and how do we recreate that taste for others?

The second example of translation offered is performed through a close reading of the photograph that serves as a point of departure for the essay. Edwards’s reading considers the image not only for what it stands for, but also for what is absent, the visual gaps. Beyond the identity of the person in the image this practice entails appraising composition, texture, lighting, and positioning of the subject. Perhaps even more telling, it also invites a rumination about how photography opens a visual conversation about what is there and what is not there. As discussed in the previous panel, visual images also call forth the dialectics of the gaze (who looks at whom and how) and the structures of recognition that inform it. The latter is precisely how Edwards, citing Barthes, engages the Latin word punctum to describe an element in a photograph that goes beyond its historical circumstances, the context it alludes to or captures, to attract and even “to wound or mark the individual viewer.” Put differently, as Thomas Keenan argues, “the image remains, without guarantees, always available for reinterpretation and reuse, of necessity the focus of an endless vigil and a struggle for re-inscription.” The image that launches “The Taste of the Archive” is one that immediately signals the need for translation based on its presence in the archive. In going on to explain what seduces him (invites for a taste) about this photograph, Edwards beckons us into his experience as a viewer: “what grabs me about this...