Painting As Translation: Elise Ansel, James Hyde, and Alexis Ralaivao
We invariably associate translation with language, with saying in one what has been said in another. But the word “translation” is fraught. Often, we privilege the source text with authority and imagine its translation, however accomplished, as a derivative approximation in another language. Yet, as the Rhetorica ad Herrenium, the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, has it, the term translatio simply describes metaphor-making: “Metaphor (translatio) occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify this transference.” Translatio as a concept is metaphoricity. Translation is an asymptotic affair, or, put differently, a curved bridge between two axes that gets tantalizingly close to each unto infinity and therefore is forever incomplete.
In Las versiones homéricas (1932), Jorge Luis Borges wonders why there are so many translations of Homer into English, from George Chapman’s in the seventeenth century to T.E. Lawrence’s in the twentieth. Borges argues that the composition of a so-called “original” text, once all mystification is set aside, is very much an act of translation in which the “translators” often surreptitiously hide their sources—their prior readings for example. He concludes that every book is potentially an infinite number of books, that translation can occur even in the same language, because readers arrive at their version of a text’s meaning by translating it through the prism of their own experience.
Translation, informed by indeterminacy as it always is, also takes place in the visual arts, in painting specifically, calling into question “originality”: an idea troubling all forms of artistic expression since nineteenth-century Romanticism. According to Borges, translation appears to lack originality because its source antecedes it (its source is there for all to see), yet, all the same, it is a new creation. Three painters who practice what we might call visual translation provide grist to grind for Borges’s theory: Elise Ansel, James Hyde, and Alexis Ralaivao.
