Translating and Interpreting Conflict - it's me

Translating the Enemy: A ‘hip-hop’ Translation of a Poemby the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922)First, this text itself - it seems that its objects - poetic and other texts of amodern revolution and civil war - are in themselves, uniquely in this writer’sexperience, global in their field of experience, and any remotely adequatediscourse on them needs some “globalizing” procedures; a noncontextualisingand purely particularistic analysis will play them false;whatever their genre - high poetry and crude propaganda alike - they figureforth, hyperbolically or, in the words of Lomonosov, a great universalisingscholar of the Russian eighteenth-century Enlightenment, through “theexcellent linkage of distant ideas”, a globally expanded and historicizeduniverse in which “Then” and “Now” are as active a pair of parameters asspecial notions of nearness and remoteness or geographical delineation anddissolution of boundaries; a naïve example serves as illustration, from aPetrograd Bolshevik leaflet, entitled ‘Appeal by the women workers of theVyborg District to sailors of the Baltic Fleet and Red Army men’, 27 June1919:The honest workers of their own countries do not wish to struggle against us. Theyare refusing to strangle their revolution and are rising against their oppressors. Theflame of world revolution is licking with its fiery tongue the thrones of theexecutioners and exploiters. In the sea of revolution in which the soviet ship issailing, other red ships are coming to its rescue. (Kupaigorodskaia 1981: 16)This refers to the German and Hungarian revolutions, but also themultifarious acts of mutiny in the British and French armies, from the end of1918 on, as well as “widespread disaffection… on the Clyde, in Scotland, inSouth Wales and other industrial centres of Great Britain.” (see Carr 1966:133-135).As this writing proceeded, its “concept” seemed to become akin to themaking of a baroque painting, in which the canvas is washed with dark ormiddling brown background. The act of painting consists in a progressivedefinition of detail by singular and highly specific high-toned patches andlocal opacities and highlights, a calligraphy of singular events - of water,vegetation, flesh, etc, which reveal the ground as an eternally pre-existingtotality, the plenitude of nature, always and already real and perfectly known.Here, the ground of history, especially of a conflict of the given magnitude,as well as the ongoing project of creating an reinforcing its meaning, carriedon through publishing and narratives of every kind, through diplomaticprocess and in extreme cases by military means, is perfectly known - by dintof tireless repetition. As “painter” one therefore needs only provideparticulars, the rest comes into view, a bit of canvas becomes the forestdepths, a limitless distance or a great storm, magically, without humanintervention, known as perfectly as nature itself.Every text - pamphlet, treatise or poem - appears as an encryption of theground (horizon) rather than the highlighted foreground detail, and the brieferand more terse, the more encompassing the claim to totality - whose falsity is213