At this point we’ve all been told to avoid anyone who is sneezing, coughing or drooling. Pretty hard to do since I sneezed this morning, coughed today at lunch and usually drool at some point during the night. Trying to avoid myself.
Numbers are skewed, huge statements are being thrown our way disguised as “facts”, and if you listen to certain news agencies then all things Mexican are to be banished. Pinatas, sombreros, and Coronas are all suspect. We love our fear. Below is Mexico in April of ’09.
This has not been brought to you by the Mexican Tourism Board. But you should still go.
a little of switzerland or something in Vietnam
I met my grandfather on my father’s side, who turns 96 this year, for the third time. In 1996, I went ‘back’ to Vietnam for the first time to attend my grandmother’s funeral. My mother’s parents passed away when she was still little. Simone and me visited ‘Gong’ (grandfather in Teo Chew, our Chinese Dialect from Shantou, 汕头 in Guangdong) in Ho-Chi Minh City for 5 days. I consider myself as an ‘Overseas Chinese’, because Chinese Culture/Tradition was passed on to us. However ‘Home’ for my parents has always been Vietnam, because they were born and grew up as ‘Overseas Chinese’ in Bac Lieu, South-Vietnam. We stayed with my uncle’s family who look after ‘Gong’ and everybody in ‘our’ neighborhood knew that the two of us were the relatives abroad from Switzerland. We went every day down to his room and were talking to him in Teo Chew. I was happy to see ‘Gong’, but in some ways he was a stranger to me, but I did notice similarities to my father. ‘Gong’ knew all the facts (school, profession, salary…) about his grandchildren and kept on asking us if it’s true that Binh, my second oldest sister, has become a lawyer. He also kept on asking if we really got the grant from Pro Helvetia and if we are really working on our project in Beijing. He said proudly that he is amazed how many languages his grandchildren speak. Somehow he thought Linh, my oldest sister, speaks Italian, what is NOT true…Pictures of us grandchildren and my parents were hanging on the wall. I recognize our old apartment in Solothurn, my Swiss hometown. I see family picture of us when we were little. All those pictures are part of my memories from Switzerland and are hanging on the wall in my grandfather’s room on the second floor at Binh Toi No133/5/3 in the 11th district of Ho-Chi Minh City – Saigon, how my parents still call the city! In the morning on our last day before we left for the airport we went down to ‘Gong’ to say goodbye. Both us took a picture with him to capture this moment. He wished us a save journey to Beijing and asked me: Is Beijing nice? I think he has never been to Beijing and has never returned to China since he moved to Vietnam.
Posted by mon | reply »winnie and pillar and and and
retour au camps de base
[春天,宋庄 | Spring in Songzhuang, China; Matthieu & Sylvie & mode d’emploi]
Posted by 丫 | more »cutting down the tree while you’re hanging from it
in praise of shadows
the translator (for a song of one notion)
In terms of the linguistic aspects, i think it has to do with my hesitations about the propagation of ideas and beliefs in the first place… how we live and die and shun and fraternise and conspire and love and love and loselove by these things, all framed for and to one another by these very fragile things such are words. Please excuse my feeling a bit pessimistic tonight, but it all feels very silly and futile when looked at from this context, as most of the time we’re simply misunderstanding one another in language, not so much that you or i or we or other are necessarily so different.
But through this comes the power of the translator as an in-between, a conductor, a metaphorical parlay and/or very possibly subversive player. We cannot ignore the importance of this in the thinking about why we should translate texts, but also maybe why we shouldn’t. There is no one-to-one here, no 辅导, not even you and me. That parlay is neither yours nor mine, yet what stakes should we play to come to something new, to something better?
As he speaks, his gesturing hand inadvertently slaps a loaf of bread.
I laugh in my own thoughts;
he won’t stop talking to me about the better.
I leave, feeling upset.
He likes discussion. I keep thinking of productivity. Yeah, yeah, yeah… boil it all down to 语言, to 文化区别. So where is the translator? Can we add to meaning? Can we destroy it? What was that term of vital nourishment, about boiling the thing down until only its essence is left? Oh right, so sorry. I’m neither the chef nor the translator. But let’s put that in motion, a blurry train ride, a thought of chasing down your unmade sculpture. What is hidden laid bare behind our backs. Like the difference between a solitary fish leading the others, a single fish swimming in front of a shoal.
Posted by 丫 | more »the unfolding or the folding, always halfway
“to say nothing, to say everything, to say the thing itself and to sink the word into its pure presence as a thing, it is all the same, the same fury. it is always to forget the caress of the sign, the light touch of meanings always distorted, never fulfilled. neither the explicit nor the implicit ever attest to anything, other than the unfolding or the folding, always halfway. not to say everything but to let something be said of everything.” (jean-luc nancy)
(one frame captured from the pile of rotting (porn) film reels, a work-in-progress with toby, more info here soon..)
Posted by f | reply »|
.
|
rss 2.0 | feedburner | del.icio.us |
|
.
|
this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. |
|
.
|
site by orange 程康 and ourwork.is. |
|
.
|
best viewed with your character encoding set to unicode utf-8. |
