Volume 10, Issue I: Ellipsis Editorial Staff 2021/22
Editor-in-Chief Cian Dunne
Deputy Editor & Layout Oisín Thomas Morrin Cover Art crocksart & Daniela Williams Faculty Advisor Dr Peter Arnds
Assistant Editors Lily Brodie Hayes Andrea Bergantino Felix Vanden Borre Anastasia Fedosova Rebecca Deasy-Miller Emer O’Hanlon Art Editor Daniela Williams
... the three dots invite me to write; they invite you to (hopefully) read. There– one undeniably apposite use of the ellipsis.
With the theme of ‘ellipsis’, we encouraged you to showcase writers who obviate ‘the ghastliness of these dots,’ as Umberto Eco characterised them. Writers who instead display an ample dual understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the ellipsis, and use it accordingly adroitly– whether that be to convey silence, uncertainty, waiting, anticipation, longing, dreaming, the passage of time… or some such other intangible expression. The word ellipsis comes to us from the 16th century, via Latin from the Greek elleipsis, from elleipein ‘leave out’. At the same time, we invited you to showcase ellipsis as a literary device, in the sense of omissions, gaps, pauses, and elisions, in and from the final text. On a more immersive level, these omissions, presently absent without the use of the punctuation point, invite us into the text we are reading– asking silent questions of us, and providing a space for us to connect the invisible dots in search of an answer. Yet even then, despite our search, the definitive answers may evade us. Mark O’Connell, though he may, in his writings, explore the transgressive possibilities of transhumanism, come the end he still finds comfort in the beauty inherent and available in the finite nature of existence– that which makes ‘life so intensely beautiful and terrifying and strange.’ And, though he may warn us of an apocalypse already begun, he still advocates for the ‘courage of ambivalence’ as we come to terms with it. Perhaps, then, there is a need, at times, to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. To be at home in the gaps between the lines– in the ambiguities, equivocacies, and opacities that constitute a large part of our experience as we navigate through our lives. When we sit down to translate a literary text, we are forced to contend with a similar degree of elusiveness. According to Cervantes, translating from one language into another is ‘like looking at tapestries from the wrong side.’ In an attempt to transpose a text into another language, the translator negotiates the obscurities and idiosyncrasies of the language it is rendered in, as well as the culture from which it springs. The translator then reformulates and elucidates these abstractions ...
