Babel - theme: translation practices

Although few people took up the Babel story in any literal way in their work (kind of surprising given it is about the beginning of language as we know it), a few of us worked on the periphery of it and more than a few people worked in or on translations. Simon Glass created a new translation of the Babel story, heavily annotated. I toyed with the idea of creating a tower out of magazines, maquette shown here. As we were leaving Marna Bunnell was still at work on an edition of flocked silkscreen prints that had something to do with the Rapunzel fable, an interesting connection. Others used multiple languages or versions of texts: Janice Gurney was using different translations of a paragraph from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. These translations, Simon's and my own play with the Babel story can be seen on website I built with the help of David Kretz in the CEE media lab, SwingSpace. Laurel MacMillan translated a gothic novel, now out of print, from French to English. Joey Dubuc had various people from different countries who were there on campus creating lists of words in their mother tongue using only certain characters. I'm not sure about all the different things people were doing. I'll have to ask.

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