Translating and Interpreting Conflict - it's me

Brian Chadwickskilful use of African-American verbal traditions….will earn a person respect andrecognition…[this is not to say] that African-Americans ‘dis’ [disrespect, discount]the written word, [but] as in other groups with a surviving oral tradition like nativeAmericans, ‘book learning’ and written documents are believed to be limited in whatthey can convey or teach. (Mufwene 1998: 208)Khlebnikov, less circumspectly, fulminated against the enemies “of wordcreation” and the “bookish petrifaction of language” perpetrated by theRussian intelligentsia, a leitmotiv running through some of his greatestpoetry. Khlebnikov was devoured by a sense of the (conjunctural)power of the word [which resembles] the action of a light ray striking a powdermagazine beneath some great capital, London, say….the detonation depends not onsheer force but the degree of accuracy… a weak and unintelligible word can destroythe world…” (Khlebnikov 1928-33, v.5: 207)A notebook entry dated March 1921 raises, in a refracted form, the issueof the power of the word (I quote since it points to the domain of conflictwhich is the site of the poem in question):People have reckoned time in the blood of war and with the sword. Henceforth warwill be ended when people have learnt to reckon time in ink. War has turned theuniverse into an inkwell of blood, and sought to drown the wretched and ridiculouswriter in it. But the writer is seeking to drown the war in his inkwell, war itself - theclash of beliefs is the ring of wills. Who will win?3. The translation of conflictThe above parallelism has been stressed partly in order to give some concretesense to a notion of the “translation of conflict”, however playful the enactedconflict in the given case thus far may have been. Both in the early aftermathof the Revolution and later, the pre-revolutionary “war games” played by theFuturists wired them to Bolshevik cultural requirements, adding a politicaldimension to their avant-gardism at a time when Bolsheviks such asEnlightenment Commissar Anatolii Lunacharsky were eagerly seekingcultural legitimation and welcomed practical input from whichever quarter.Implicit in the preceding discussion of Futurism is an argument for thesociolinguistic responsibility of literary translation, the urging of a need fortranslation to respect the situatedness of its source texts, especially when aliterary practice problematizes its site, and assigns significance to conflict -when the normal conditions of textual reproduction are disrupted and whendisruption is intentionally constitutive of the aggressor texts’ semiosis. TheFuturists played an exuberant game, assigning high aesthetic value to“rough” qualities, to thingswritten [the Russian word “pisat” means to represent graphically, and denotes bothwriting and painting] and seen in the wink of an eye, the arranging of clumsystructures, tensile reading and writing, more awkward than greased boots or a lorry inthe drawing room - a lot of knots, bundles and patches, jagged, grainy surfaces …204