Raum 106 ist eine Klasse, ein Studio, eine Bibliothek und eine Publikation. Die vorliegende Publikation wurde von der Klasse Prof. John Morgan an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf gestaltet. Sie erscheint jährlich: Die nächste Ausgabe wird zum Akademierundgang im Februar 2020 publiziert.
Raum 106, Issue Nr. 2
Solid Objects
2019
Klasse Prof. John Morgan
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Eiskellerstraße 1
40213 Düsseldorf
www.klassejohnmorgan.de
Production/Editorial/Design:
Klasse John Morgan
Translators:
Sarah Ehrlenbruch
Boaz Friedman
Kanade Hamawaki
Viktor Jeraj
Lisa Klinger
Maxi-Magdalena Lorenz
Harkeerat Mangat
Vivien Mohamed
Remco Reijenga
Anna R.W. Salling
Rosa Sarholz
Peter Schlegel
Thomas Artur Spallek
Qijia You
Printed by Druckerei Kettler,
Bönen/Westfalen, Germany
ISBN 978-3-9819003-2-3
Pages 49 – 60 printed letterpress in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf by Klasse John Morgan
Thank you:
Christiane ‘Polly’ Bücek
Roland Dewald
Donatella Fioretti
Gunnar Kettler
Laim Kim
Olli Kolibabka
Andrea Marcellier
Marvin Prang
Sarah Reinish
Victoria Tarak
Jana Weißflog
Virginia Woolf
© 2019 The contributors, Klasse John Morgan
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Wer hat Angst vor Virginia Woolf?
English
by Virginia Woolf
Solid Objects was written in 1918 and first published in The Athenaeum in October 1920. It was reprinted after her death in A Haunted House in 1944.
German 1
by Anna R.W. Salling
I
Something said and something unsaid thickened and crystallized and kept hanging in the air. It hung there for so long that the crystallization turned to weight and the words fell to the ground like stones of compressed meaning. The windfall was left where it fell, scattered around the living room floor. Just as some matters inevitably will perish, others are so persistent, impossible to get rid of. Fruits that let go before they have ripened walk again like someone who didn’t manage to say it. Like ghosts of someone who wanted something so…, so that they by the pure will return, just to discover that the opening that their sentence was supposed to fill has been long filled and sealed. So they walk, restless, again, in the search of that nearly impossible place. In this way every sentence, conceived but unused, gets its mouth – and tongueless ghost.
II
The stone fruits lay, useless and forgotten, dust fell and a wall to wall carpet was installed, covering up the floor. Under the carpet they disappeared out of sight and out of consciousness. But at night the souls of the stones left the crystallized shells and haunted the house and the dreams of the inhabitants. At daytime only a vague undefinable taste was left on the palate, somewhere between sour, sweet, salty, hot and bitter, until, as the day progressed, it blended and faded among everything that was said. It’s a fragile moment, when a sentence stands on the tip of the tongue, ready to jump out into the abyss of the said. Those who hesitate or waver often turn to ghosts.
III The house was sold, abandoned and new inhabitants moved in. They renovated the dusty house, removed the carpet; and there in the slits of the floorboards their daughter found the petrified pieces. They were unlike any stones she had seen before, so
she collected them carefully and placed them in a small bag.
She was a kind of whisperer, thought herself to hear things hum and talk, and soon she understood that they weren’t stones. She laid the bag of stones under her pillow at night and the roundest of them she placed in the cavity that forms between the hip bone and the rib cage, when sleeping on the side.
IV
They sang her to sleep and while resting she let them enter her. As this went on, a strange longing for their voices to become hers grew inside of her. But at dawn she could never recall what they had said. It remained just at taste in her mouth. She sucked her tongue to extract it and searched to find it in foods and objects. Awaiting the revelation of the stones, soon she stopped talking, since her words seemed to flush the taste down her throat into disappearance.
V
Her silence was by no means a conclusion but an interlude for what inevitably had to come; she found herself at the point of translation.
NB
Feste Gegenstände (2018) was translated from Virginia Woolf’s Solid Objects (1920) outside of my mother tongue, Danish, operating in the strange twilight between two foreign languages.
German II
by Sarah Ehrlenbruch
Liebster, ich spüre genau, dass ich wieder wahnsinnig werde. Ich kann nicht noch einmal durch solch schreckliche Zeiten gehen. Diesmal werde ich nicht gesunden. Ich höre Stimmen und kann mich nicht konzentrieren. So werde ich das tun, was unausweichlich scheint…
Abschiedsbrief von Virginia Woolf an Leonard Woolf, 28. März 1941
Parallel zu Woolfs Leben und Wirken erscheint 1913 Freuds Traumdeutung, sein Ansatz der Psychoanalyse gewinnt rasch an Popularität.
„(…) Freuds Arbeit, die er auf Englisch schrieb, muss den Anhängern von Bloomsbury, also Virginia Woolfs unmittelbarem Freundeskreis, die, wie James Strachey teilweise selber Mitglieder der Society for Psychical Research waren, bekannt gewesen sein, mit Sicherheit also auch Leonard Woolf.“
Faustkultur
heim·su·chen
1. als etwas Unerwünschtes, Unheilvolles o. Ä. über jemanden, etwas kommen; befallen „ein Krieg, eine Dürre suchte das Land heim“
2. bei jemandem in einer ihn schädigenden oder für ihn unangenehmen, lästigen Weise eindringen „Einbrecher suchten das Lager heim“
Freud ordnet das Haus ausschließlich der Frau zu, und dies nur in sexuellem Sinn. Das Haus soll die Gebärmutter symbolisieren, und die Tür den Gebärmuttermund etc. Die Psychologie nach Freud hat klar festgestellt, dass das Hausgleichnis aber generell gilt, dass also auch Männer als „Häuser“ im Traum dargestellt werden können. Das Haus im Traum ist generell die träumende Person selbst. Das Haus im Traum gibt Auskunft über den psychischen oder physischen Zustand der träumenden Person.
Aeppli, S. 247.
Der Charakter des Hauses im Traum symbolisiert Lebensgröße und Lebenshaltung der träumenden Person
Aeppli, S. 253–254
Die Hausfassade symbolisiert die „Persona“. Eine überladene Fassade symbolisiert eine Person, die nur auf Schein aus ist. Eine ungepflegte Fassade symbolisiert eine Person, die wenig Wert auf Schnickschnack legt, aber die eigene Existenz gefährdet.
Aeppli, S. 254
„vermengt sich ein jedes Objekt, ein jedes Ding so grundlegend tief mit der Gedankenwelt des Betrachters, dass es seine eigentliche Form verliert, um sich in einer idealen Gestalt erneut zusammenzusetzen, welche dann das Hirn verfolgt“
„John war entschlossen:
er musste es besitzen.“
„Es war jener Impuls, welcher auch ein Kind dazu bewegt einen Kieselstein vom Wegrand aufzulesen; ihm ein neues Leben in Wärme und Geborgenheit zu versprechen; das unbefangene junge Herz erfüllt von einem Gefühl der Kraft und Güte, ausgelöst von jener Handlung. Unerschütterlich glaubend, dass auch das Herz des kleinen Kiesels springen müsse vor Freude. Vor Freude, unter Millionen von Steinchen erlesen, erkoren worden zu sein ein Dasein in Glückseligkeit zu genießen anstelle des ihm vermeindlich Blühenden in unbarmherziger Kälte und Nässe der tristen Straße. „So leicht hätte die Wahl auf einen der anderen meiner Brüder fallen könne, doch erkoren wurde Ich, Ich, Ich.“
Ein wahrhaft großer Mensch verliert nie die Einfachheit eines Kindes.
Konfuzius
Labyrinthian
Translation composed by Rosa Sarholz
A list of clues in the search of a translating hermit
1
To translate experiences into
language is like finding a way through a maze.
2
a sequence of tarot cards
The Priestress
The Empress
The Tower
Temperance
The Magician
The Hermit
4
Borges labyrinth, island
San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
7
a sequence of books
Hyperion
Or The Hermit in Greece
Friedrich Hölderlin
1797
Hyperion
John Keats
1820
Hyperion Cantos
Part III – Endymion
Dan Simmons
1995
3
a sequence of paintings by Vittore Carpaccio in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice depicting the story of the translator and hermit St Jerome
Saint Jerome and the Lion in the Convent, 1502
Funeral of Saint Jerome, 1502 ( p. 45)
Saint Augustine in his Study, 1507 ( p. 109)
5
‘I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.’
The Garden of Forking Paths
Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
Antonyms
by Lisa Klinger
an·to·nym
a word opposite in meaning to another (e.g., bad and good).
Even if the definition reads simple and practical: to decide what the opposite of a certain word should be is a very subjective and delicate choice that has to be made wisely.
Letter Press
by Klasse John Morgan
Sitting at tea on her thirty-third birthday, Virginia and Leonard Woolf agreed on three resolutions: they would purchase Hogarth House in Richmond, procure a handpress to do their own printing, and buy a bull dog, whom they would name John. […] After Leonard and Virginia were rejected from the St. Bride’s school of printing because they were not trade union apprentices, they visited Excelsior Printing Supply Co., where they found the machines and materials required for printing. Leonard describes the scene in his autobiography: ‘Nearly all the implements of printing are materially attractive, and we stared through the window at them rather like two hungry children gazing at buns and cakes in a baker shop window.’ They explained their predicament to the shop owner, who encouraged them to pursue printing without taking an apprenticeship course; he sold the Woolfs a printing machine, type, chases, and cases, along with a 16-page pamphlet that would ‘infallibly’ teach them how to print. […]
‘We unpacked it,’ she wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell, ‘with enormous excitement, finally with Nelly’s help, carried it into the drawing room, set it on its stand – and discovered that it was smashed in half!’ While they waited for their handpress to be repaired, they began distributing the type to be properly stored in the typecases. Virginia wrote that sorting out type was ‘the work of ages, especially when you mix the h’s with the n’s, as I did yesterday.’ The infinite patience and meticulousness required for letterpress printing, however, did not discourage Virginia; rather, she concluded from these preliminaries, ‘real printing will devour one’s entire life.’ Virginia recounted in her letter that after two hours of typesetting, Leonard ‘heaved a terrific sigh’ and said: ‘“I wish to God we’d never bought the cursed thing.” To my relief, though not surprise, he added “Because I shall never do anything else.” You can’t think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying it is.’
From Modernism Lab, Hogarth Press, Jessica Svendsen, www.yale.edu
Das Setzen und Drucken im Bleisatz wurde von den Studenten der Klasse in der Druckwerkstatt der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf durchgeführt.
Da der aktuelle Bestand an Bleisatz über die Jahre immer weniger wurde, wurde diese Version des Textes aus verschiedenen Schriftarten, die schlicht im Inventar verfügbar waren, gesetzt:
Bodoni, 12 pt, Regulär, Kursiv und Halbfett
Garamond, 12 pt, Regulär und Kursiv
Venus, 12 pt, Schmal und Halbfett Mager
Venus, 10 pt, Regulär und Halbfett
Einige fehlende Buchstaben wurden durch Platzhalter ersetzt, die während des Textes als schwarze Stellen auftauchen. Fehler sind passiert und wurden nicht korrigiert.
Urban Dictionary
by Maxi-Magdalena Lorenz and Vivien Mohamed
p. 61
Teh is a common joke.
Dicks and pills everywhere.
But the translation for eyes. On point. Why isn’t this translation in common dictionary’s?
You should google what Anakin Skywalker does not like.
Women are great, men are dicks – that’s what urban dictionary said.
‘Poseur: Do you know
Virginia Woolf? No?
She’s like one of the coolest writers around, dude. I can feel her pain man. Life is pain. I want to drown myself too.’
Urban Dictionary
Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary operating under the motto:
‘Define Your World’. It was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham, originally intended as a dictionary of slang or cultural words or phrases, but is now used to define any word or phrase. Words may have multiple definitions and everyday 2,000 new entries are submitted.
Newtonian
by Boaz Friedman
An object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.
From Newton’s Laws of Motion
Augustinian
Translation composed by Remco Reijenga
2018, Venice – Following thoughtlessly, focusing on the familiar bags and winter jackets. Endless left turns, right turns and of course bridges. We stop in front of a white church-looking building. We enter through the thick red velvet curtain and find ourselves in a room covered in wood and paintings. We’re at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, surrounded by seven large Carpaccio paintings. The artist, not the food. Each painting is captivating and we linger for a long time getting lost in the details. A member of staff points out a shell in the very last painting, Saint Augustine in his Study, and tells us the story behind it: two figures, on the beach, opposing understandings, a shell – a solid object? Back in the painting the German Spitz looks suspiciously at the scene.
Eine Parabel — in Anlehnung an die Legende des Heiligen Augustinus, nach der englischen Fassung der Legende Aurea durch William Caxton (Band 5, erschienen 1483. Neuedition durch F. S. Ellis, erschienen 1900). Aus dem Englischen frei übersetzt durch Sarah Reinish.
Japanese
by Kanade Hamawaki
Mein Verständnis der Begriffe „Solid“ und „Objects“ hat auf meine Entscheidungen bei der Übersetzung des Textes Einfluss genommen. Japanische Schriftzeichen können als Hieroglyphenschrift verstanden werden, bei der jede eine eigene, bildsprachliche Bedeutung hat:
確: gewiss; sicher; bestimmt; deutlich; genau,
固: fest; hart; solide,
とした: (Adverb) bezeichnet einen bereits länger bestehenden, festen Zustand (aber keinen Jetztzustand)
物: Ding; Sache; Gegenstand,
体: Körper; Form.
Für mich bildet Virginia Woolfs Gebrauch von bestimmten, beschreibenden, teilweise merkwürdigen Adjektiven, die wiederholt auftauchen, ein besonderes Merkmal ihres Schreibstils, den ich in meiner Übersetzung übernommen habe.
Ein Freund Virginia Woolfs habe sich diesbezüglich einmal geäußert, dass dieser Gebrauch von Adjektiven „nonsense“ sei – sie beschreibe damit einen Gegenstand extra „solid“/
„fest“, der nicht „more solid“/ „noch fester“ werden könne.
It-narrative
by Lisa Klinger
This translation was inspired by It-Narratives or Object Narratives, a literature genre popular in 18th century Great Britain.
Láadan
by Thomas Artur Spallek
Láadan is a feminist constructed language created by the linguist and novelist Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 aimed at expressing the views of women. It was spoken by rebel women in her science fiction series Native Tongue. Native Tongue is set in a future dystopia where women have no rights and live as the property of men; they use Láadan to speak in secret, nursing a desire for future freedom. But Láadan was both a fiction and, Elgin hoped, a real – world experiment – she wanted to see what women might learn to say with a language of their own. Elgin made the grammar and syntax rules of Láadan freely available.
A characteristic of Láadan is the translation of certain words based on the speakers feelings:
silence
rile: silence
rilelh: malicious silence
rilehana: silence that is comfortable and natural
riledim: silent refusal to communicate
míirile: awed silence
rilehum: silence that is a purposeful refusal to communicate, with denial that it’s happening
rilhehum: malicious silence that is a purposeful refusal to communicate, with denial
rilerahum: silence acutely painful to you, but the other person seems unaware
rilherahum: malicious silence acutely painful to you
rilerashum: silence imposed by internal force of will because all words are wrong words
CMYK
by Kanade Hamawaki
Alle Vierfarbdrucke können bis in den kleinsten Druckpartikel in Cyan (Helio-Echtblau), Magenta (Purpurton), Yellow (Gelb) und Key (Schwarz) unterteilt werden.
Die Schrift bekommt erst im Druckverfahren einen Körper, wird sicht- und lesbar. Durch einen Druckerdefekt entstanden in dieser Version des Textes allerdings Aussätze, die die Schrift stark verfremden und unkenntlich machen. Auch wenn es sich teilweise nur um einen Hauch fehlender Tinte in den Strichen und Kurven der Buchstaben handelt, erscheinen diese plötzlich fremd — „[...] like a creature from another world“.
Semantic Poetry
by Vivien Mohamed
Oxford Dictionary was used for this translation. Cambridge wasn’t as good. Did I choose the – kind of – dramatic translations or is it a given thing? The translation for eyes disappointed me in every dictionary though.
Semantic poetry was developed by Stefan Themerson and the french literature collective OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Literature Potentielle) – a group of writers, poets and mathematicians that experimented with literary structures by employing constrained writing techniques. Semantic poetry is based on words taken directly out of emotionally neutral dictionaries. In a semantic poetry translation each word in a given text is to be substituted for its dictionary definition.
Systematic
by Remco Reijenga
10892 Zeichen
2364 Leerzeichen
155 Majuskel
204 Linien
Chinese
by Qijia You
Alles was jetzt ist, ist alles aus der Vergangenheit.
Wir werden uns sicherlich wiedersehen, an einem Ort in der Erinnerung.
Dialogue
by Remco Reijenga
‘It speaks for itself. ’
Rearranged
by Harkeerat Mangat
The solid blocks that make up these sentences have been rearranged to activate the objects in the story, as opposed to the subjects, or people. The omittance of John and other pronouns of the like, along with the stagnation of Charles who remains as the walking-stick he was initially described to be, gives way for the fluidity of these characters’ consciousnesses, as well as those of the translator and reader, to emerge in however way these people engage with these objects, which in this translation, have been rearranged to be given a more central focus.
Painting
by Edvard Munch
Munch, Edvard: Utsikt fra Nordstrand, 1900–01, Öl auf Leinwand, 75 cm × 100 cm, Mannheim, Kunsthalle Mannheim. (aus: Edvard Munch: Complete Paintings: Catalogue Raisonne)
Literal
by Viktor Jeraj
This vast amount of lifetime that Benjamin took to translate Proust or Baudelaire.
About three years of commitment, that another artist took to translate and interpret those abstruse ideas in Duchamp’s Green Box.
Natural Language
by Peter Schlegel
Official press release by IBM: Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing capability, representing a new era in computing. Watson analyzes high volumes of data and processes information more like a human than a computer — by understanding natural language, generating hypotheses based on evidence, and learning as it goes. As organizations work to make more data-driven decisions – 2.5 billion gigabytes of data being created every single day, they need advanced systems that are able to crunch massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and deliver actionable insights within seconds. […]