Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

An Essay About Reading An Artist’s Book About
Reading
Sarah Jacobs
The essay and the artist's book described in it
were conceived as being two parts of a single
project and were made/written in the same
space of time.
You are looking at a smallish notebook, not too
thick, say 100 pages or so. The black cover with
manufacturer’s name at the back (Seawhite of
Brighton) gives nothing away but an intention -to
be sober, discreet. Touch it. It is rough. Pick
it up. You see immediately it has been divided
in half. At the back, all the pages are clumped,
bundled together, tied by a narrow blue-grey
ribbon. If you want to see what is inside the
bundle, you would need to take a decisive step.
Who would start so bold? Not I. At the front,
the fly leaf gives one author – Heinrich Von
Kleist – but two translators, two publishers,
two years of publication, and two titles – The
Earthquake in Chile and The Chilean Earthquake. 1
The words are handwritten, in ink and in
pencil.
Moving on, turning the pages, you see that
each verso page is blank. Each recto page has a
rectangle of paper, creamier in colour than the
paper of the notebook itself, pasted lightly on
it. The pasted rectangles are printed but right
away you can see something is happening –
there are gaps (not too many) and some words
(rather few) are picked out by being printed
more faintly than the main text. This is not a
riddle. I will give the game away. This edition,
this redaction, this notebook, this untitled
artist's book, compares or picks out differences
between the two translations, by Ronald Taylor
and by David Constantine. It forms part of my
translation studies, and its making was just
about contemporaneous with the making of
‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ “Drawing Book” 2
which is a multiple translation of the great
short story by Honoré de Balzac.
Having flipped through the front half, you turn
to the beginning, and start to read. And – even
though the initial words are missing – you can
immediately locate yourself in time and in
67
space. It is 1647, in the Kingdom of Chile, in its
capital, Santiago, and a young man is standing
in a corner of a prison, preparing to hang
himself.
A year or two earlier in a grand house…and
then, again, here and secretly. In the garden of
a convent.
What is this year 1647, and where is this Chile,
this Santiago? Is it the first time you have visited
the Kingdom and the story? Or the 3rd, or the
10th? And who are you anyway? The answer
determines the time and space of your
particular reading.
Ostensibly, the place of the story is a city at the
bottom of the long thin country constituting
most of the west coast of the lamb chop that
was (when I was a girl) South, but which now
forms part of Latin America. The Inca sites are
far away. So far outside the story that it is only
the most anachronistic reading that proposes
them as an absence or even a ghost. Peruvian
dominion of the country has already ceased
(1533) but its boundaries have not yet been
agreed with Spain (1722). The city, familiarly,
has houses, a convent, a prison, a mighty river,
a Cathedral with bells, law courts and a site for
public executions. And, in the year of the story
– at the very moment the story begins – the city
is struck by a devastating earthquake. A matter
of historical fact, or so I take on trust.
For already the place is so far away, and the
time so remote from Kleist -- and the more so,
from me -- that I abandon attempts at
understanding this tale as an historical
recreation of a far-off continent in a chronicled
and documented time. Did Kleist read eyewitness
accounts of the earthquake? I care not.
Was it an event which reverberated in world
history? I doubt it. A thinly-veiled substitute for
the earthquake which rocked Lisbon in 1755?
Here we come closer. I remember that Voltaire
published Candide in 1759, and a little
research shows The Lisbon Disaster in 1756. So
we are in Europe, in an age of philosophers,
and two decades or so later, Kleist will be born.
How long will it take you to discover that if you
lift the lightly pasted rectangles, some of the
notebook pages have words handwritten on