Conclusions
There are two contrasting ideas regarding the marginality of homophonic translation with which I would like to conclude this project. While the first part of this thesis discussed the common notions, they are then deconstructed, beginning with the discussion of Louis Zukofsky. Prior to discussing what is contrasted and deconstructed, I would like to reiterate the common concepts that characterize the marginality of homophonic translation.
In the First Chapter, the basic concepts of four dominant strategies have been presented and labeled “conventional” as opposed to what I have termed the Remainder, that is, the marginalized homophonic translation strategy. In the following chapter, sensitivity to sounds and language, as well as the acceptance and exploration of the Remainder of a language has been pointed out as possible reasons for practicing homophonic translation. The Third Chapter presented several groups of practitioners of homophonic translation: Jean-Pierre Brisset, the para-scientist; Louis Wolfson, the schizophrenic and Anglophobic; Willard V. Quine and Gilbert Harman, the philosophers; Van Rooten, Ormonde de Kay and Gustav Hulme, the nursery rhymes translators, and Louis Zukofsky, David Melnick, and Charles Bernstein, the poets. All of the people mentioned above, apart from Willard V. Quine who is a well respected philosopher, have not been given a lot of attention for their work on homophonic translation.
I then turned to contrasting notions on homophonic translation with the concept of homophonic translation as art which I introduced while discussing Zukofsky, Melnick and Bernstein’s work. The kind of art associated with homophonic translation is not based on the same idea of art as embraced more popularly by a wider audience, but on art as understood, or appreciated by very few. In his essay on Louis Zukofsky, Bob Perelman points out that
Without the frame of the exemplary writer to organize their responses, the majority of contemporary readers have not found the resulting linguistic complexity worth the labor. In recognition of this, Zukofsky has sometimes been granted the guilder body prize of being a poet’s poet--in fact, Guy Davenport has called him a “poet’s poet’s poet.”
(Perelman, 1994:171)
The label of a “poet’s poet’s poet” brings to mind the idea of “art for art’s sake,” rather than “art for the masses’ sake.” If one assumes that this kind of art could be ascribed to all the other groups of homophonic translators discussed in the Third Chapter, it should not be surprising that it remains marginal.
On the other hand, however, there is doubtlessly a big potential for homophonic translation to develop and reach a broader audience. While there have always been individuals with conditions or predispositions discussed in the Second Chapter, i.e. those who are blind/low vision people, bi- or multilingual, and those who wish to explore the possibilities of language encompassed in the Remainder, it has not always been easy to share and expose their experiments with language (homophonic translation among them) to others. The increasing availability of the internet has the potential of contributing to the change: it has been a recent phenomenon that the blind have been able to use the internet because of the development of access technology, such as speech synthesizers, for instance. As the fees for using the internet become more competitive, people from more countries can join it and expose their own languages to others. Moreover, those who are experimenting with the Remainder of the language can expose their experiments more easily. Thus, even if their work is not accepted by literary magazines, they can post it online, i.e. on their own website.
Therefore, I agree with Charles Bernstein’s observation that
Just as the old dirt roads and smaller rural routes were abandoned on the megatraffic on the interstates, so much of the present informal, noncapital intensive exchanges on the net will become marginal back channels in a communications system owned and controlled by Time & Space, Inc., and other giant telecommunication conglomerates, (...).
(Bernstein, 1999:73)
At the same time, however, I believe that the “marginal back channels” are still more easily available and potentially reached by a much broader audience, than that of small magazines or unpublished manuscripts. I do not want to create an impression that I oppose small presses, in fact, I think a multitude of them is an essential tool to counter the major literary magazines; the only fact I wish to stress is that if they are printed in small numbers, they do not reach a large audience, if they are online, however, their potential audience expands well beyond the city or the region where the magazine is published. Ellis Toussier-Ades Bigio-Antebi whose language experiment I describe in the Second Chapter may serve as an example. Her poems are not published, but are available on the internet and their readership is not limited to Mexico, where the author lives. The internet, therefore, is not a remedy for all marginal language experiments, but it enables a much higher potential interest in them.
It is hard to foresee which concept of homophonic translation will dominate in the future: it may stay a hermetic language experiment practiced by very few or it may become a more widespread practice. As Benjamin observed, however, the ideal audience one creates in his/her mind never recreates itself in reality. It is perhaps best, therefore, to let oneself play with language as much as possible, and not to be preoccupied with how this question will resolve itself.