Event Type
This roundtable offers a rigorous investigation into the complex relationship between fidelity and creativity in contemporary translation, exploring the transformative process between languages, media, and materiality as the site of profound philosophical inquiry. How does political history reverberate through the rift opened by the distance of translation? What is this distance composed of? Is it present in other language acts, or in the construction of meaning generally? What transformations can be called translation, and how does stretching this definition inform each mode? Where is the boundary between assimilation and the political right to opacity? This panel explores these subjects in depth while examining the art of translation through lived examples.
There are many paths towards fidelity, if fidelity to a singular, stable original is even a worthy aim. A straightforward conveyance of meaning and sentiment is equally as valid as forging non-hierarchical, rhizomatic connections across disparate territories. In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. Consider the materiality of our oldest preserved narratives: a cuneiform tablet needs light and shadow to be read. It can hold water in the wells of its marks. There have even been instances of students biting the clay out of boredom, thus sending an impression of their teeth down through the centuries. How can a translation capture this embodied, material trace? This question extends beyond the archaic. One panelist uses distance from a sensor in a painting to produce music, redefining the text as a new sensory machine and an assemblage of physical and digital inputs. The question of fidelity also appears in practices of deliberate mistranslation or self-translation, which use constraint to deconstruct the original and expose its hidden political ideologies. And it becomes a vital act of resistance when a translator, working from a geopolitical conflict zone, deliberately foreignizes the target language, refusing to assimilate a politically-charged text fluently and instead imbuing it with discomfort to mark the violence of its origin.
This panel journeys from the physical materials of language—clay, code, paper, or soundwave—to the political praxis of the translator. It explores translation not as a simple transfer but as a site of constant negotiation: a dynamic field of exchange, political pressure, generative slippage, and even productive betrayal. Moving beyond fidelity, the discussion will posit translation as a minoritarian mode: a deterritorializing machine that makes a major language stutter, infecting it with the foreign. By examining translation as a deconstruction of the original, an embodied encounter with otherness, and a method for curating a “minor archive,” this roundtable reframes the act. It is not a secondary craft, but a primary and urgent philosophical praxis for our time.