Zero NegativeCero Negativo Is A Collection Of Stories In English And Spanish, By Isabel Del Ro. The Storiesaretranslations

Zero Negative Cero negativo is a collection of stories in English and Spanish, by Isabel del Río. The stories are ‘translations’ or ‘re-writings’ of each other that are sometimes fairly close in sense and sometimes diverge from each other far more than we would traditionally expect of a ‘translation’.

Someone just drew my attention to this, which I missed before.

This is another WIP from fellow artist Sam, and I just want to say: THIS. So much this. Every article I've read about the Prometheus Bound which argues that Zeus isn't a big bad points to this "gentle touch" that impregnates Io as if it's a good thing. Like, "well it's not rape because it's just a touch, a sort of immaculate conception so we don't even have to worry about consent at all." I'm working a bit on the Prometheus Bound right now as one of the only sources outside Hesiod that mentions Kratos and Bie (two of the children of Styx) and I'd been sending Sam problematic extracts from what I'd been reading, and then she just produces this: this beautiful, succinct piece of art that is this fantastic rebuttal to all these stupid articles I've been reading. And it's just. The. Best. Thing. Ever.

MakingLearning & the Leuven Conference

A group of which I am a part (MakingLearning) recently ran a practical, art-therapeutic workshop at the Psychology and the Classics conference in Leuven. The workshop we ran is one we have run several times before: Hanging My Heart. In this workshop, participants create ‘votives’ - small art-object treasures mimicking the kind of votive offerings found from the ancient world. Such objects could represent prayers for help with a particular issue or illness, or perhaps even a prayer of thanks for something now over or completed. Obviously, in a contemporary context we (as in, we who run this workshop) do not make these votives with the intention of leaving them in a temple as an offering to a god. In our workshops, the value must be found in the process itself rather than the dedication of a finished item. 

One of the things I struggle with most as an artist, and in general as a person, is the idea that my activities and projects could be process-oriented rather than goal-oriented. I have always worked with the latter model. I make because I want to actualise something; I have an idea in my head and I want to turn it into a physical item that can be seen, held, and shared. The first few times I was asked if I enjoy the various modes of crafting I engage in in pursuit of this goal the question baffled me. It was so irrelevant to my goals that not only had I not considered it, but the question itself confused me. 

I still can’t answer the question. I can’t tell you if I enjoy sewing or knitting (etc.) or not, but I can at least explain that enjoyment of the process is not why I continue to do these things. 

  Perhaps it is odd then, that the group I work with and in - MakingLearning - is emphatically focused on the value and quality of the process: learning should be fun. Making should be fun. The process of making can be more important than the finished item. The process is the part in which learning, self-reflection and discovery happens. Everything of value to the maker happens in the process itself - it does not magically spring into our minds when an object is finally complete. 

  You can see the struggle I have with process-oriented thinking: even when trying to think with such a model my mind immediately grasps at the non-physical outcomes of the process. Goals, goals, goals. My mind remains stubbornly outside the process. And, perhaps paradoxically, this is precisely the reason I value MakingLearning’s approach. Every workshop is another chance for me to try and understand this other mode of thinking, to try again to just enjoy the process, without thought for any sort of goal: to try and engage in a making where success or failure are as irrelevant as enjoyment is to my usual way of working. 

  So when we run the votive workshop, in which participants make votives representing fears, hopes, sadnesses, etc. mimicking the ancient practices of votive giving, what do I make votives of? 

I make votives of anything I want, of things without outside meaning, I allow myself to play, to experiment with new techniques and not worry at all about what the finished item might look like, because this time, at least, it just doesn’t matter; it is the process of making the object, not the object itself, which constitutes my votive.

Published by the London Review of Books, 8 November 2012

In Anne Carson’s six translations of Ibykos, the mode of fidelity to the source text varies not according to the closeness of cross-lingual synonyms but according to the spirit of the translation. It is an extreme example of a translator bringing herself and her own ideas into a text, and also an effective one—if her goal is not to replicate Ibykos but to play with his work.

(cp. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz]; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird [Wallace Stevens])

I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusion of pure originality ever since I read this comment from Pablo Neruda, which Mykki Blanco tweeted a few days ago. Last week, a subscriber to my newsletter alerted me to the fact that some other person had started an email newsletter with a structure very similar to mine. “It seems like he’s copied your whole format,” wrote the reader, who was flatteringly indignant on my behalf. I told him that I appreciated him looking out for me, but that I try not to keep tabs on or worry about these things too much. I don’t own the idea of breaking up a newsletter into discrete sections, and I assume that most people subscribe to mine because of the substance of what I include, not due to the fact that I have created a unique new format. Because I haven’t. A few weeks before that, I had a conversation with a friend who’s an illustrator. She told me that younger artists sometimes ask her to divulge exactly which materials she uses—brushes, ink, paint, paper. She finds it insulting. She said she’d never give away such specific information, because to do so would be a tacit endorsement of other people copying her work. I told her that I didn’t think it was a big deal. All creators do a certain amount of ethical stealing, and no other artist could make the work that she does, even using the exact same materials, because she infuses everything with her point of view—which she owns completely. I would like to tell you I sounded wise, but I probably sounded like an asshole. Then today a friend tweeted about a new podcast that’s all about friendship. I felt a flash of annoyance: “Hey, we already have a podcast about friendship.” And I had to take a step back and remember that originality is not the virtue it’s made out to be. This is not friendship-podcast Highlander. There can be more than one—or two or three or four—excellent podcasts about friendship. It’s a big and important topic! And then I subscribed to the new podcast.  Obviously you don’t want someone passing off your words as their own or tracing your illustrations and republishing without attribution. But such instances of straight-up stealing are way less common, I think, than the petulant urge to protect your perceived originality from people who are merely making something similar. I’m putting this here to remind myself that next time I feel the desire to defend and clamp down on my work, it might be time to try making something new instead. And accept that even the new-for-me thing is not going to be totally original.