Mind the Gap!

 

I read an intriguing book review this morning written by Ali smith. She was writing about a new translation of Camus’s L’Etranger. Maybe it is obvious but it hadn’t really occurred to me that a translation could so dramatically alter the meaning of a text and change the whole tenor of such an important literary work. In her review Smith talks about the way this particular translator listens beneath the literal meaning and ‘permits, an original edgy strangeness in the prose itself… ’ Ali Smith  Writing on a tightrope The Times Saturday September 22 2012.

 

A response to the image on my blog last week set me thinking again about the gap between seeing and perceiving ; the gap between intention and interpretation. These are thoughts that worry and disturb as well as excite as after all isn’t it that very mystery of the gap that makes the whole process of making art so compelling?



Ohh...and looking too!

Constructed Drawing
Photo by Robert Taylor