Francis Bacon

Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation. This may sound like a cliché. (I think it is a cliché. Perhaps we can come back to cliché.) There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator: physical, metaphysical. Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho’s inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half. Half the poem is empty space. A translator can signify or even rectify this lack of text in various ways—with blankness or brackets or textual conjecture—and she is justified in doing so because Sappho did not intend that part of the poem to fall silent. Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define. Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be rendered into another. Take the word cliché. Cliché is a French borrowing, past participle of the verb clicher, a term from printing meaning “to make a stereotype from a relief printing surface.” It has been assumed into English unchanged, partly because using French words makes English-speakers feel more intelligent and partly because the word has imitative origins (it is supposed to mimic the sound of the printer’s die striking the metal) that make it untranslatable. English has different sounds. English falls sillent. This kind of linguistic decision is simply a measure of foreignness, an acknowledgment of the fact that languages are not algorithms of one another, you cannot match them item for item. But now what if, whithin this silence, you discover a deeper one—a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself. Here is an exemple.
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In the tenth book of Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus is about to confront a witch named Kirke whose practice is to turn men into pigs, he is given by the god Hermes a pharmaceutical plant to use against her magic. Here is Homer’s description of it:
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So speaking Hermes gave him the drug
by pulling it out of the ground and he showed the nature of it:
at the root it was black but like milk was the flower.
Moly is what the gods call it. And it is very hard to dig up
for mortal men. But gods can do such things.
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Moly is one of several occurrences in Homer’s poems of what Homer calls “the language of gods.” There are a handful of people or things in epic poetry that have this sort of double name. Linguists like to see in these names traces of some older layer of Indo-European preserved in Homer’s Greek. However that may be, when he invokes the language of gods Homer usually tells you the earthly translation also. Here he does not. He wants this word to fall silent. Here are four letters of the alphabet, you can pronounce them but you cannot define, possess or make use of them. You cannot search for this plant by the roadside or Google it and find out where to buy some. The plant is sacred, the knowledge belongs to gods, the words stops itself. Almost as if you were presented with a portrait of some person—not a famous person but someone you might recognize if you put your mind to it—and as you peer closely you see, in the place where the face should be, a splash of white paint. Homer has splashed white paint not on the faces os his gods but on their word. What does this word hide? We will never know. But that smudge on canvas does serve to remind us of something important about these puzzling beings, the gods of epic, who are not consistently bigger, stronger, smarter, nicer or better-looking than humans, who are in fact anthropomorphic clichés from top to bottom, yet who do have one escapade up their sleeve—immortality. They know how not to die. And who can say but the four untranslatable letters of moly might be the place where that knowlegde is hidden.
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There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit. I want to explore some examples of this attraction, at its most maddened, from the trial and condemnation of Joan of Arc.
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[…]
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All Joan’s guidance, military and moral, came from a source she called “voices.” All the blame of her trial was gathered up in this question, the nature of the voices. She began to hear them when she was twelve years old. They spoke of her from outside, commanding her life and death, her military victories and revolutionary policts, her dress code and heretical beliefs. During the trial Joan’s judges returned again and again to this crux: they insisted on knowing the story of the voices. They wanted her to name, embody and describe them in ways they could understand, with recognizable religious imagery and emotions, in a convenctional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof. They framed this desire in dozens of ways, question after question. They prodded and poked and hemmed her in. Joan despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could. […] It is her rage agains the cliché that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage. We all feel this rage at some level, at some time. The genius answer to it is catastrophe.
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I say catastrophe is an answer because I believe cliché is a question. We resort to cliché because it’s easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don’t we already know what we think about this? Don’t we have a formula we use for this? Can’t just send an electronic greeting card or Photoshop a picture of what it was like rather than trying to come up with an original drawing? […]
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Now Francis Bacon us someone who subjected himself to inquisition repeatedly throughout his career, most notably in a series of interviews with art critic David Sylvester, which are published in a volume called The Brutality of Fact. “The Brutality of fact” is Bacon’s own phrase for what he is after in a painting. He is a representational painter. His subjects are birds, dogs, grass, people, sand, water, himself and what he wants to capture of these subjects is (he says) their “reality” or (once he used the term) “essence” or (often) “the facts.” By “facts” he doesn’t mean to make a copy of the subject as a photograph would, but rather to create a sensible form that will translate diretly to your nervous system the same sensation as the subjetct. […] Everything else is cliché. […] He hates all the storytelling, all that illustration, he will do anything to deflect or disrupt the boredom of storytelling, including smudge the canvas with sponges or throw paint at it.
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Francis Bacon does not invoke the metaphor of translation when he describes what he wants to do to your nerves by means of paint, but he does at times literally arrive at silence, as when he says to his interviewer, “You see this is the point at which one absolutely cannot talk about painting. It’s in the process.” […]
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Stops and silence of various kinds, however, seem to be available to Francis Bacon within the process of his painting. For instance his subject matter, when he chooses to depict people screaming in a medium that cannot transmite sound. Or in his use of color, which is a complex matter but let’s look at one aspect of it, namely the edges of the color. His aim as a painter, as we have seen, is to grant sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. He wats to defeat narrative wherever it seeks to arise, which is pretty much everywhere, since humans are creatures who crave a story. There is a tendency for story to slip into the space between any two figures or any two marks on a canvas. Bacon uses color to silence this tendency. He pulls color right up to the edge of his figures—a color so hard, flat, bright, motionless, it is impossible to enter into it or wonder about it. There is a desolation of curiosity in it. He once said he’d like to “put a Sahara desert or the distances of a Sahara” in between parts of painting. His color has an excluding and accelerating effect, it makes your eye move on. It’s a way of saying, “Don’t linger here and star thiking up stories, just stick to the facts.” Sometimes he puts a white arrow on top of the color to speed your eye and denounce narrative. […]
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Bacon says we live through screens. What are these screens? They are part of our normal way of looking at the world, or rather our normal way of seeing the world without looking at it, for Bacon’s claim is that a real seer who looked at the world would notice it to be fairly violent—not violent as narrative surface but somehow violently comopsed underneath the surface, having violence as its essence. […]
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Our English word purple comes from Latin purpureus, which comes from Greek porphyra, a noun denoting the purplefish. This sea mollusk, properly the purple limpet or murex, was the source from which all purple and red dyes where obtained in antiquity. But the purplefish had another name in ancient Greek, namely kalche, and from this word was derived a verb and a metaphor and a problem for tanslators. The verb kalchainein, “to search for the purplefish,” came to signify profound and troubled emotion: to grow dark with disquiet, to seethe with worries, to harbor dark thoughts, to brood in deep of one’s mind. When German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin undertook to translate Sophokles’ Antigone in 1796, he met this problem on the first page. The play opens with a distressed Antigone confronting her sister, Ismene. “What is it?” asks Ismene, then she adds the purple verb. “You are obviously growing dark in mind, brooding deeply (kalchainous’) over some piece of news.” This is a standard rendering of the line. Hölderlin’s version, Du scheinst ein rotes Wort zu färben, would mean something like “You seem to color a reddish-purple word, to dye your words red-purple.” The deadly literalism of the line is typical of him. His translating method was to take hold of every item of the original diction and wrench it across into German exactly as it stood in its syntax, word order and lexical sense. The result was versions of Sophokles that made Goethe and Schiller laugh aloud when they heard them. Learned reviewers itemized more than one thousand mistakes and called the translations desfigured, unreadable, the work of a madman. Indeed by 1806 Hölderlin was certified insane. His family committed him to a psychiatric clinic, from which after a year he was released as incurable. He spent the remaining thirty-seven years of his life in a tower overlooking the river Neckar, in varying states of indifference or ecstasy, walking up and down his room, playing the piano, writing on scraps of paper, receiving the odd visitor. He died still insane in 1843. It is a cliché to say Hölderlin’s Sophokles translations show him on the verge of breakdown and derive their luminous, gnarled, unpronounceable weirdness from his mental condition. Still, I wonder what exactly is the relation of madness to translation? Where does translation happen in the mind? And if there is a silence that falls inside certain words, when, how, with what violence does that take place, and what difference does it make to who you are?
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One thing that strikes me about Hölderlin as a translator, and about Francis Bacon as a painter, and for that matter about Joan of Arc as a soldier of God, is the high degree of self-consciousness that is present in their respective manipulations of catastrophe. Hölderlin had begun to be preoccupied with translatin Sophokles in 1796 but did not publish Oedipus and Antigone until 1804. Judging his first versions “not living (lebendig) enough,” he subjected them to years of compulsive revision, forcing the texts from strange to more strange. […]
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Maybe Hölderlin was pretending to be mad the whole time, I don’t know. What fascinates me is to see his catastrophe, at whatever leve of consciousness he chose it, as a method extracted from translation, a method organized by the rage against cliché. After all, what else is one’s own language but a gigantic cacophonous cliché? Nothing has not been said before. The templates are set. Adam long ago named all the cratures. Reality is captured. When Francis Bacon approaches a white canvas, its empty surface is already filled with the whole history of paiting up to that moment, it is a compaction of all the clichés of representation already extant in the painter’s world, in the painter’s head, in the probability of what can be done on this surface. Screens are in place making it hard to see anything but what one expects to see, hard to pain what isn’t already there. Bacon is not content to deflect or beguile cliché by some painterly trick, he wants to (as Gilles Deleuze says in his book about Bacon) “catastrophize” it right there on his canvas. So he makes what he calls “free marks” on the canvas, both at the beginning when it is white and later when it is partly or completely painted. He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand, or just throws a can of paint at it. His intention is to disrupt its probability and to short-circuit his own control of the disruption. His product is a catastrophe, wich he will then proceed to manipulate into an image that he can call real. […]
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Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve