DPA - DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN ETSAM - ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL OF MADRID UPM - TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF MADRID
Unusual Atlas of construction details ud
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assignment 2013-2014
UNUSUAL ATLAS OF CONSTRUCTION DETAILS --Technical University of Madrid (Spain). Democritus University of Thrace (Greece). --Grupo de Innovación Educativa: Dispositivos Aglutinadores de Proyecto (DIP). --Architectural Design. Course 2013-2014. Fall term. Unit 19 Soriano. --Spanish teachers: Federico Soriano, Pedro Urzaiz, Eva Gil. Spanish assistant teachers: Álvaro M. Fidalgo, Arantzazu Luzárraga, Francisco G. Triviño, Jose M. López Ujaque, Toni Gelabert, Mariana Cantero. Mentors: Borja Lomas, Maurizio Salazar. Greek teachers: Polyxeni Mantzou.
de la cultura contemporánea
Editorial Libro de bolsillo sobre arquitectura. Título: “Unusual Atlas of construction details. Ud 19 Assignment. 2013-2014.” Noviembre 2013. Colección: Seminarios de Arquitectura. Publicación Non-profit de investigación universitaria. 10 euros, 7 pounds, 14$ USA.
Esta publicación forma parte de los trabajos realizados dentro del grupo de investigación PRoLAB_ Laboratorio de Investigación del Proyecto Contemporáneo, línea de investigación “Atlas”.
ETSAM
Esta publicación posee el sello “I”. Director Fisuras. Fisuras Director.
Federico Soriano.
Editores de este número. Editors for this issue.
Federico Soriano. Pedro Urzaiz.
Redactores. Editorial advisers.
Dolores Palacios. Francisco García Triviño. Jose M. López Ujaque. Mariana Cantero. Borja Lomas. Álvaro M. Fidalgo.
Diseño gráfico. Graphic Design.
Federico Soriano. Francisco García Triviño. Jose M. López Ujaque.
Imprenta. Printer: Stock CERO S.A. C/ San Romualdo, 26 2ª planta Edificio Astygi 28037 - Madrid Tel: 917 54 54 54 / 687 930 036 Distribución, subscripciones. Distribution, subscriptions: Revista Fisuras Avenida de Levante 41 28016 Madrid Tel/Fax: 0034 91 519 21 56 fisuras@fisuras.es Deposito legal M-31361-2013 ISBN 978-84-940502-6-8
Unusual Atlas of construction details
Index Assignment Details & Instructions Texts Bibliography
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Assignment
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Drawing and object
(1)
There is an intimate relationship between the architectural drawing and the constructed result which does not correspond to a mere homothetic coincidence between representation and reality. The drawing is not only an aseptic or technical representation of an object. It is spatial or architectural expresision. It coincides with the style. It is an anticipated manifestation of the construction. The pencil lines have material or tectonic qualities. Volume, proportion, order, and meaning are clearly visible in the drawing, and we have all become used to that. What we would like to propose is that the weight, density, parameters, abstration, style, processes, and so on, should also be direct translations fo the type of representation that we choose. If the project has a tectonic value, the drawing becomes more explicit or stuctural. If, on the other hand we propose a procedure instead of a result, the lines become more diagrammatical. If the space is light, the drawing is ethereal. This happens because the architectural thinking process is visual, and the sketch is precisely an idea; just as direct as the word itself should be. So they are not signs but material for the projects. Using a different system from the proposed concept distorts the thought process and generates mistakes.
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(1) Soriano, Federico. 100 Hyperminimals. Madrid: Lampreave, 2009.
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Details & Instructions
Note: Be alert, instructions translated ‘on the fly’ to English by Google Translate (from the original Spanish text).
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INSTRUCTIONS 01 1. Warning: you do not build it, but your subconscious. It is a part of your brain. This can be confusing -with the real-. Do not worry. It is not harmful. Rather, the opposite.
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INSTRUCTIONS 02 2. Note: you do not need to be in REM sleep; or even be asleep. Although building a dream awake is only available for few privileged, since it requires high specific preparation. It requires some ability that is only found in certain type of people.
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INSTRUCTIONS 03 3. Choose, from among the materials available in the subconscious, those who are most suited to the type of sleep to build. 3.a. Preference for translucent and transparent materials, let say, those that let you to see through, to change the world easily, in case you want to dream of a succession of spaces that take an easy transition. 3.a.i. Within the translucent and transparent ones; if the degree of sharpness of your dream allows it, you may distinguish textures, differentiating between vitreous; resinous; methacrylates... This allow you to define the brightness of your dream. 3.a.ii. These translucent and transparent materials are applicable to windows and doors, but also to any kind of architectural element. Since neither cold nor hot exist, in case you do not want to, and that there is no risk of greenhouse effect since the sun doesn’t enter from the east nor sets in the west, therefore, your dream can be located in night phase if you want, you can arrange translucent glass partitions and use them in any element on floors, roof, and any component of furniture. The garden can be transparent. You are able to plant translucent flowers and trees that leave see through the landscape that has been built for the occasion. Even yourself can be transparent. The former case is detailed below in “personifications” in the sub section on “shy”. You can build stairs, elevators and transparent ramps, if desired. You may want the feeling of “vertigo”. Further details about how to get this kind of feeling, in the subsection of dreams that you do not usually want to build, called “nightmares”.
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INSTRUCTIONS 04 3.b. Otherwise, any material is valid. Do not attempt to name them. It’s quality will change a thousand times. Better, try to describe what you remember. Next, examples of types of materials, according texture, and their applications: 3.b.i. Satin pavements. Allow slide easily; either on skates, or just in shoes. Satin partitions have the disadvantage that prevent easy climbing, especially if you want to become a climber, or any type of arachnid (see sub section 8.c. “personifications”).
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INSTRUCTIONS 05 3.b.ii. Aqueous pavements assume almost automatically a change of medium. That is, to use the trampoline on the balcony and soak in the street. Beware with the sewerage. Grid may not be aqueous. 3.b.iii. Aqueous partitions supposed to go through it and easily get to the next room, but it is likely to get wet to the next phase of your sleep. Keep this in mind, unless you want to build the next dream in a very cold place, in which water may become ice (all this happen if your subconscious wants; the change of phases of the elements are not necessary in dreams, mostly because temperature changes don’t exist and, if so, are decided by you), and perhaps the dream turns into a nightmare due to hypothermia. It also allows fish to live in it (who says fish, says whales, algae and any seamen). It is your dream; all what you will arrange will not die unless you want. Everything depends on the thickness of the wall. Typically, the thickness of walls allows placing certain types of fish, but you can increase the thickness to the size of a whale, if desired. And you can still call it wall but not aquarium. It has been said that putting names to things makes no sense in the matter we are dealing with. 3.b.iv. An aqueous roof lets you see the stars at night from anywhere in the house, and combined with aqueous floors allow the view of the stars even from the basement. If, in addition, they contain fish, whales, seaweed, live inside the slabs, it seems likely that these animals swim among the stars. In that case, do not worry if you confuse the sea with the sky. It’s a dream. It’s your dream. In addition, you can always dive into a slab and check that it is not. Or that it is. You can dive to the moon and touch it checking that it shimmers. Or don’t.
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INSTRUCTIONS 06 3.b.v. Viscous paving impede progress in the sleep. If the viscosity increases, you may even get stuck in a phase of sleep. Do not worry. In this case, you can build the dream all about, and make it all happen around him. Static dreams are also interesting. They allow you to observe more thoroughly what you want to have that happen. 3.b.vi. Partitions too viscous cause the same effect; not to mention the slimy roof. In these two cases, it is better to keep just the right viscosity; that is, one that allows walking through walls and ceilings. Walk among the hanging lamps. Skip the doorposts to move to another room. Tapestry become carpets, and windows, sometimes are more doors than just doors.
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INSTRUCTIONS 07 3.b.vii. Soft flooring. Allow jump easily; allowing easy reach, from the street to the second floor slab, where your house is located. Further more. You can jump fences, trees, lampposts and even homes. You can skip the whole city if you want. 3.b.viii. Floors too soft can cause sleepiness, especially if it gives them a fabric texture and painted white, may well confuse them as a continuous mattress. You may feel the need to lie, and even sleep on the floor of the dream. The case of a dream within a dream will not be seen in this chapter, by assuming two levels of complexity. However, it is quite suitable for the case of the dreams of personification in “vague” (see sub section 8.c. “personifications”).
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INSTRUCTIONS 08 3.c. These materials may be combined or processed in another, at any time during the construction process. 3.c.i. Combinations. For example, you can place a satin floor, and slide down the handicapped ramp until the pavement becomes viscous, slowing the skating, and then gets soft, and then jump to the lower floor, because in your dream the stairs were omitted, and then fall, after a double pirouette, on the aqueous street.
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INSTRUCTIONS 09 4. Make these materials would be in various forms, which may or may not deal with those features to which associated when they first appeared in your dream. Maybe you named them. That name means nothing.
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INSTRUCTIONS 10 5. Colors. The choice of colors has to be done very carefully. In general, almost never coincide with those of the conscious part. Thus, it makes easier the transition changing scenery, to another that matches only in colors, or to allow an easy transition to another with changes of scale (see scale changes in section 14). 5.a. As an example. You are in the piece of stage machinery, behind stage, and hanging from ivory white wires, like lace fabric. You move from wire cable to cable, and in one of these movements, after an indecipherable intermediate state, you appear among the few fringe ivory white curtains. 5.b. Or that red tree, someone started with the hand, to give to another someone.
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INSTRUCTIONS 11 6. Build stories in these spaces. Let them be. You can change them, but do not try to understand them. They are above logic. Your subconscious will take light years in this area. 6.a. The story of the door of the abandoned house that never went through and through, the story of the president of government that wanted to be and this is, the story of the white horses could not mount and ride here, the history of the test could not approved and adopted here, the story of what never dared to tell him, and here he does, the story of that of fleeing, and here you can continue to do so, but that of which copper flee and escape other faces elapses in another direction.
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INSTRUCTIONS 12 7. You will be the star of all. Try perceiving. Perceive all you can, because if this is a common dream, come again. But never the same. What experience will not return. 7.a. Use all elements of its construction to give maximum intensity to his perception, which is the most important feature of dreams. The subconscious can make you aware of things that were rejected as unrealistic. 7.b. Use cold, heat, light, shadow, fly, slide, jump, dance, listen, dazzled, feel fear, pain, happiness, cry ... Everything you want, you will not have any repercussions. Even within the same dream, you can be aware of that, that is a dream. 7.c. Do not be afraid to risk: jump from a window; DROP off a cliff; flies with its own wings, shout in the middle of a math class.
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INSTRUCTIONS 13 8. You are the hero of every story, but can personify what you want. This embodiment, as is the case with the materials and any other construction element can be modified at any time of the dream. Being able to build their own identity, gives many possibilities, which have obvious perceptual consequences. Construct and deconstruct.
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INSTRUCTIONS 14 8.a. Character. Then any practical examples: 8.a.i. If you want personified into a shy, built according to this feature. Use - barrier elements. The following is valid: columns, trees, sloping walls, overhangs, doors, anything that would prevent the care of others to concentrate on his person. Are prohibited open spaces especially beaches, pools, and any place where you are exposed to many people. It is also advisable to use a certain type of furniture, including items such as planters, curtains, screens. The wardrobe is essential: glasses, hats, fans, handkerchiefs, and even newspapers. Design them well. At any time, these objects can become architectural elements, and protect you from the looks on another scale. You may fall into a glass of water, and have to run out to dry with a tissue, because someone looks through the windows of glasses. However, with changes in scale embodiments are detailed in the sub-section associated with construction details. You can also become invisible, giving it a completely unexpected turn his dream, and taking away all sense barrier to the elements placed at the beginning.
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INSTRUCTIONS 15 8.a.ii. If you want to personify someone who likes to capture the spotlight, such as a stage actor, you should just use opposing elements. It may represent a play within a dream. To paraphrase someone very wise, you know that theater, theater is ... because we’re building a dream. And, like a dream, you can forget the theaters. Actually, it’s you and your head. So maybe it’s better to dream that he is aware. If not, you will not believe. Sure, they just can represent himself his own work. As this is the place. Sleep Sleep is not a return, is another dream. O yes ...
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INSTRUCTIONS 16 8.b. Physics. Then several examples: 8.b.a. You may want to personify an acrobat. To build his dream, pay special attention to horizontal linear elements, such as power lines, tree branches, lights. Any item that has tectonic can be the basis for his antics. And, wherever the place, shall take effect from the most diverse nature. 8.b.a.1. For exemplify, if you place these items in a city, such as the red light, this will allow, after a double fatal fall into a hundred, that will drive you to the next spin, the power cord, which is slightly higher.
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INSTRUCTIONS 17 8.b.b. You may wish you personify an athlete who wins a competition. Or maybe give the goahead and realize that, in reality, what you’re passionate about this dream that builds, are the spaces you see twice as fast if I did walking dream. You really expect the medal does not care, so maybe wake before reaching goal. Or you never are, you want to build a dream it’s all go. You can design a circuit cross that part of a red track, divided into six lanes, and one of these streets is a carpet that slides down a building, and that leads to a staircase, and a continuous happen that fails stays bind very well. Can you sleep through asking people where the finish line. You may even find the target and there told that the competition went yesterday. And you infer from this that takes more than a day running, say dreaming.
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INSTRUCTIONS 18 8.b.c. In case you want to build the dream of a long jumper, to note that the construction of this dream make the feet are a few steps and a jump. For this reason, it is necessary to pay special attention to the sternotomy. The use of elements that allow estereot贸micos mark this rhythm with the feet. For example, building on his dream of a river stones, and finish the jump in the aqueous liquid, or use of the roofs of buildings, taking each step on a roof, and finishing the jump introduced in the fireplace. Or on the moon. The other moon.
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INSTRUCTIONS 19 8.b.d. The same applied to the pole vaulter, just that this needs an auxiliary element for your jump. For example, you can build a desktop to take steps on the floor slab of the table, and, leaning on a pen, jumping between the two arms of a compass and falling into an eraser. This section is dedicated to related personifications-scaled, and with one dedicated to construction details. 8.b.e. If you want personified in skier, use estereotomical steeply elements. Speed there. At least not that fast. Yes there is, however, the feeling of vertigo when sliding. 8.b.f. Maybe you like fencing. In that case does not have to slide in a linear track. It’s a dream, you can exercise in three or four dimensions, because not even a quarter here can be understood as such.
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INSTRUCTIONS 20 8.c. Impersonations in animals or animal features. 8.c.a. You can fly. I really do not need wings, but if you want to feel the wind scroll down and up to beat them, build yourself. Or maybe you prefer completely transformed into an eagle, and plan the cities, enjoying privileged vision have their pupils. Or go to the back of a pigeon, after necessary scaling (see scale changes in section 14) and land softly in a loft, and find out all the news that transport trips. 8.c.b. You can run to pace the cheetah. You can go through the towns at speeds over the car or bus (taking into account the traffic). 8.c.c. You can get rid of preparing the case for good. You can have anything you want to your trip, then you can take him home, furniture and partitions included. It can be turtle. The only drawback is that you may take a little longer than usual to travel.
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INSTRUCTIONS 21 8.c.d. Impersonations objects. The indescribable, by unimaginable feeling of being a piece of paper back and forth falling from above. 8.c.e. Embodiments with scale changes. See subsection of construction details.
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INSTRUCTIONS 22 9. The secondary characters are also modifiable dreams. The faces are those faces you create. There will be found to have behaviors that identifies with them. Moreover, as you progress in the construction of his dream will increasingly facility to change behaviors and faces. The faces are fundamental transitions dreams. There comes a point where you do not even have to be people. So, one of these minor characters can be the resolution to a physical problem mentioned below.
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INSTRUCTIONS 23 10. Voices. The dialogues. You can build a dream soundproof, but it is extremely difficult to run well. It takes too much knowledge of the subject. Note that the images do not arrive at the time of construction, from their conscious, but the sounds, yes. Inevitably, there will be sound. The sounds you hear in real time are included, by necessity, in their dreams. In this section we mention dialogues construction. We recommend building with sound. Anyway, silent dreams have the corresponding section. Only perhaps be published in the next edition. Like all the above items, the voices have a clear embodiment in dreams.
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INSTRUCTIONS 24 10.a. The monologues. Building dreams with monologues, by requiring a higher qualification, also made explicit in the next edition. 10.b. The dialogues. The dialogues are dialogues. The dialogues give the keys to switch to the next dream, are guidelines, or are employing the acoustic elements to raise your stress subconscious perceptive or sensitive, are excuses to think, to solve things. The dialogues are formed with words, and these have meaning even more indirect than the aforementioned elements, with a character that would call more “architectural�. But nothing further. 10.b.i. For example, if you want to build a dream about solving quantum physics problems, never use equations. A cost her subconscious as concrete signs reflect a mental image. Use dialogue. Each dialogue hides an equation; every thing someone asks you and you respond, hides an answer or response approach to these problems, every time you are looking for something and can not find, is trying to resolve a doubt that their conscious had.
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INSTRUCTIONS 25 10.b.ii. But the above example is the most complex to build. The use of dialogue to resolve most common things, is more close and understandable. For example, you can build a dialogue in which her fiancĂŠ suggests setting the table, and you get angry with him, preferring to go out to eat. But eventually reached, and ends by placing each plate and each covered on the table. What actually happens is that you plan a trip, and each object in the cutlery is a limit, and every dish is a city that sits on the panel, which is a world map of your travel brochure. It happens that once arranged all the plates, is unable to decide the seat. And her boyfriend is the one to tell you that your site is precisely the one closest to the door, he wants to help her bring the food prepared. And in the next phase of your sleep, you find yourself without knowing how or why, in the desert. If built correctly the dream, you have entered a dialogue in which he was commissioned to bring the salt pot. 10.b.iii. The dialogues are key. They are almost paths. If built well with dialogues, these will take you to build rich spatial locations. The word carries a picture implied. Can you build a dream forever looking for a flower. Ask you to all gardeners of all gardens in the world of his dream. You will tour the gardens from all corners of the world.
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INSTRUCTIONS 26 11. Music. Indispensable dreams, believe it or not. All you hear in their conscious, is there, in the brain. If it takes all day listening to a tune, most likely wake up with it. To build either your dream, you should handle basic musical structures. The more branches of perception can cover, the better. Music intensify the development of the other. Your subconscious will extrapolate musical codes. Let them do. You may hear harmonies ever heard before. And it is likely to be unable to write them down in a score for playback. Do not worry. It is likely that the conscious does not know understand its beauty. And if it happens that yes, maybe your conscious desvelarle handle, sticking out in the middle of its construction dream, to get the staff to keep on the nightstand and a code to transfer him to understand, that your subconscious wanted to say during REM .
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INSTRUCTIONS 27 12. Level the gradient of sharpness of your dream. If you intend to build a dream around the time of awakening, upload it to the fullest. Never pass 100% since its construction risks too resemble what is already known. The gradient of sharpness of your dream may vary between different times of the same. The images may be more or less blurred, depending on the degree of indeterminacy of you want to equip your dream. It is especially important to reduce the gradient step from dream to dream. The more unmemorable, the stronger construction. The fuzzy dreams allow more variation in the contiguous. The fuzzy dreams allow more interpretations (interpretations within the same dream, you understand, because you do not care for any interpretations thereof which can make the conscious).
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INSTRUCTIONS 28 13. You can also scale the light. Warm light is recommended for nice dreams. Cold light, for dreams that veer toward sadness, but without touching the sub-section that mention later called “nightmares�. Light, like sharpness, can never be 100%. Except be a marvel of construction, have your eyes closed. It is doubtful that anyone who reaches a gradient of 100, can keep them. Pure obvious: the eyelids do not allow it.
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INSTRUCTIONS 29 14. Scale changes. 14.a. Smaller scale. You wake up in a dream, and trying to put the foot down, sliding down the quilt back into its shoe. Are you using one of the most common scale changes. In this type of dreams we must pay special attention to architectural details, and all types of finishes. When you get out of your shoe, overcoming the disadvantages of the sense of smell, which, if neglected to build a better - smelling continue partnering to what is often detached from within, walk barefoot in the park of his room. So far everything is going well, but when you try to enter the bathroom, you may stumble when walking on the tiles. If joints between them were not well arranged, are an element of risk maximum scale changes. Another common mistake is the doors do not fit well, and pass through drafts, dreams that cause colds and other illnesses. If you are good architect, will worry about these little finishing fundamental scale changes.
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INSTRUCTIONS 30 14.a.i. As for the architectural details, just to mention some examples that show that are also important. A poorly resolved detail on deck, ill post a waterproofing, damp causing even leaks, if such a change of scale, may be at high risk for him, even deadly, in the dream, you understand. I do not think that was pleasant that, while watching TV in his dreams, the volume of water corresponding to an Olympic pool, fell on him. And automatically, his dream would to sub section nightmares, maybe it was not the dream you wanted to build. 14.a.ii. Note that certain diseases are perhaps twenty times more annoying, since you fell twenty times its size. A crack of the size of person, wide measuring what your hand, it becomes a hole. And you never build a house to vent through gaps. Especially when those gaps will increase as time passes, and the pathology is not settled. 14.a.iii. Not to mention the cooling and heating systems. A radiator the size of a building, is an element that can melt what is proposed, if you pick guard.
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INSTRUCTIONS 31 14.b. Bigger scale. He wakes you, in another of his dreams, and, in attempting to put the foot down, he realizes that he can not, because he has broken the bed, which is about twenty times smaller than when he slept - in dreams - . It shattered the bed, and the whole building. So far everything is going well, but when you try to enter the bathroom adjoining building, as it has also destroyed his own - , you may bump into the adjoining houses, if you did not care to have in the urban plans of their sleep, they kept the right distance, if you wake in the next dream with a change of scale. Then, perhaps, into awareness that the usual size WC no use. In this type of dream, can only be built with a look of urban look. The houses are to be solid, while a neglect of her clumsy feet does not end with them. Forget flimsy partitions; use the concrete; better yet, the whole house of solid stone. Use safety factor of twenty times as often. And multiply the width of the sidewalks pretty much the same coefficient. So, at least, include in your dream persons having a common size.
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INSTRUCTIONS 32 14.b.i. Regarding the architectural details that are absolutely irrelevant review. During the duration of his dream, in all probability can not build a proper house to its new size under rescaling. So be content with sitting on the roof (did I say sit? Better, support hand), and watch the spectacle of what it is not like you, until the next dream.
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INSTRUCTIONS 33 14.b.ii. Pathologies are also negligible. You are the most provocative of conditions in buildings. Please note that your footing could cause failure of the foundation, giving rise (in those buildings not destroyed upon waking) to earthmoving and may even shift the tectonic plates, and making a whole complex of buildings lean toward your footprint. Depending on the location in which it is his dream, the buildings are not calculated for earthquakes, ie, try to refrain from walking. Even recommend breathing soft, and it could be that they are not prepared for strong winds. Smoking is, of course, prohibited. If you want to smoke, you have to go into exile. If you feel like coughing, flee. Ah, no, that walking is also dangerous. Do not cough, then. Sneezing leads directly to sub his dream nightmares section because there is no building prepared for hurricanes that level. If you will keep up your dream and life to the people we dream, of course. 14.b.iii. The cooling and heating of buildings brings you totally do not care. Try not to get cold or heat in his sleep; build a suitable climate, because, as it has destroyed his home, will be held outdoors.
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INSTRUCTIONS 34 15. The combined dreams. One of the most interesting types undoubtedly are combined dreams. These dreams are those that use a variety of resources. Take an example. You have personified long jumper, and has also changed in size. It has built a dream in which a piano is the tartan which to leap. He has arranged beside him three other jumpers. The four set out to execute his jump. Stride length is similar, but everyone starts jumping from a key, running, at the same time a jump, a succession of chords, a rate of four for four: three soft and final fall.
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INSTRUCTIONS 35 16. Structure. Do not attempt to structure. Do not attempt to assemble them. They do not follow an order that you are able to undetstand from your conscious side.
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INSTRUCTIONS 36 17.
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INSTRUCTIONS 37 18. Networks. The use of networks is fundamental in the construction of dreams. They have much to do with the diagrams. The diagrams are abstractions that materialize or become visible in various ways. Do not try to make a diagram of the construction of their dream. They go crazy. There is no logic that you can be able to understand. Networks are connections between things. Just a layer. It is easier to recognize a layer. A diagram has more degrees of complexity. You can even include the fourth variable (though usually used in a while), and that is, in dreams, we have said that this variable is not as we understand it.
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INSTRUCTIONS 38 18.a. For example, the network of drainpipes building the home of your dreams . It is, in fact, as the plane of the hydrographic network of the home, if you decide to make a change of scale that can be understood as a country, and browse the hot water pipes. It is a vital network. 18.b . For example, the power supply of building the home of your dreams. It takes energy that is transformed into light, and gives life to the devices you use to live, ie indirect brings life to each inhabitant. Network is another vital part of your dream. 18.c. Similarly, your subconscious works with layers of information, with data from the same hierarchical level. Sleep like elements. Many times it’s that simple. Now, what is behind them is much further than understood. These coats are like the facade of building your dream. Their interrelationships; why the physicality of both, and how to lie and why the order do not apply to you, for the moment, to find out. Chances are that the law is so complex that ... Leave, and dream.
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INSTRUCTIONS 39 19. The use of the connecting vertical and horizontal. Unnecessary. The change of scenery is due not only to the appearance of a ladder, a ramp, and even less of a lift. The transitions are done using any other element. This aspect is detailed below in the section on transitions. Even so, then give some basic instructions to use: 19.a. Stairs are the most recurring element in the construction of dreams. It’s not the change of scenery. Dreams do not need a ladder to move on. It should be only the deed itself to ascend, to the fact that, step by step, the world we are building to move in reverse to yours. Or, in case you want to insert into your dream a spiral staircase that the box that contains it, or the building, surrounds you, turn you around, backwards and down. All this applies also to the decrease, changing the meaning of words.
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INSTRUCTIONS 40 19.b. Spiral staircases. If you opt for a dream -or part of it- in loop, the connecting element is essential. Can you roam around whenever you want, you will never reach the roof. It may even, when you decide to leave the loop (if it succeeds before the conscious part of your brain on him) appears in the basement. Ramps can also be used for this purpose, but it is likely to produce dizziness, including vertigo. If you are interested especially this kind of feeling, see sub section “nightmares�.
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INSTRUCTIONS 41 19.c. The elevators. There are elevators. In general, do not lead to any place that is in a layer above or below you (unless they are transparent - see sub transparent elevators sub - section). And even less, these strata are broken down in flats or any kind of level that relates to numerical data, in obedience to a scale for height. Forget. Your subconscious does not bother to pay attention to such insignificant details. Use the elevator element for a change of scenery, world. You can be up, down, left, right, anywhere in the time he lived on the conscious, or anywhere that you lived, only imagined. Do not get your hopes up, do not you, so does your brain. Produces images from real data. Not that I have seen them before. I just do not remember them. Or is that it fails to crack the code used to your subconscious that seem new. Think of a lift is the way to another building. Be careful. Many elevators are a mental exercise supine. Just press the button for the elevator, even though display a number, is an act of high risk. You can get up you exhausted without knowing why, no need to dream running or fleeing. The elevator can spend all his energy. The number on the elevator button is a trick of his mind. You can even display it in a dream. Ignore. Behind a number can be anything. A number usually hides a building the size of a skyscraper. Care. 19.c.i. The elevator as space itself. The possibility exists that you want to build a dream that causes feelings of claustrophobia. In this case, see sub section on “nightmares�. 19.c.ii. The glass lift. It works similarly to the stairs, as you go into visual contact with the world of his dream. The whole world moves down-or up, obviously.
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INSTRUCTIONS 42 20. Transitions. These are steps between states. These steps often succeed through transit elements. They need not be windows or doors. It almost anything: a cabinet, a ladder, a television ... Or the face of a person who is transformed into another. Smoke can also be, or decrease the brightness, or the definition of the images. Intermediate states are blurring. In the construction of their dreams is essential to know these intermediate states have either. If left unfilled may mind, always active, watch what happens outside, causing you to be unveiled.
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INSTRUCTIONS 43 21. Forget the clock. Time does not exist. At least not the time. Do not try to make a schedule of the work. Do not attempt any level of your dreams. Completely devoid of meaning, since one of the fundamental features of the plans is to be done before construction, and basic characteristic of a dream is, precisely, is not planned. Can you try to draw its construction a posteriori, but then I could not call it flat. More than anything, it would be doubtful that you could draw fine lines and crisp.
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INSTRUCTIONS 44 22. Forget the subway. Forget any measurement system. Not to mention dimensions. If you are able to narrow any element of the dream, Pinch as. Has built wrong. Are you awake? If you are able to narrow, but not using the measures of the international system, or they vary as construction progresses, stop pinching, that is not going to hurt. It has built too well. He has understood so well the laws, it has been able to get around them to break them. Congratulations. Well, congratulations to that part of his brain that he has.
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INSTRUCTIONS 45 23. There are not physical laws either. At least not those laws. Build with such laws, in the duration.
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INSTRUCTIONS 46 24. There is no language. Make no difference just words or morse code, that any kind of sign. Your brain will extrapolate the data.
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INSTRUCTIONS 47 25. Above all, perceive. Build your perception.
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INSTRUCTIONS 48 26. In dreams, there is a sub-section on buildings causing unwelcome perceptions, commonly called “nightmares“. You may want to build a dream like this, although this is not usual. To give some examples of the most common: 26.a. Those related to spatial tension. Spaces too narrow, which generate feeling of anguish, by narrowing. Small, enclosed spaces, such as elevators, which generate perceptions claustrophobic. 26.b. Spaces related disorder. Partitions with a slight inclination, uneven floors, stair steps of different length; corners not exactly perpendicular sides. 26.c. Related to the perception, such as vertigo. Jumping into the void. Build a dream that falls off a multi-storey building. You know that will not hurt. As it is the appropriate level, if it causes a jolt too strong, you can get to wake up. 26.d. Related negativity or catastrophism. Cracks or buildings that collapse on you. You have to build a dream ignoring the section on diseases. That is, have them sleep on a foundation irregular, on shaky ground if possible. 26.e. Flee. That dream in which only dedicated to run through scenarios, without contemplating them, hiding behind barrier elements.
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INSTRUCTIONS 49 26.f. Loop. It’s a nightmare elevated to the highest degree, because although what nondistress look too serious, it expands both in time, it is repeated over and over again, which is of the worst nightmares. If you want to master the loop, build a dream that has any connection element, never getting anywhere. For example, spiral staircases that lead to no landing; infinite corridors; declines vacuum that do not result in any soil, or infinite sequences of doors.
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INSTRUCTIONS 50 27. After its completion, the conscious will cater to open his eyes. You can try to remember. But do not worry if you see blurry images, if it is unable to draw a thread between sleep stages, if you have gaps, if dreamed something that is immoral or shameful, if she have gone something that seemed unbelievable, if history ended up leaving with the unknown. Therein lies the great value of dreams. Do not attempt to decipher. It’s not about that. At least, not now. The subconscious is much smarter. It moves in another dimension. We have said that using another language. It is impossible to understand from the conscious. I will handle it to transform that code, if it deems necessary. Or maybe you can glimpse something in certain intermediate states of unconsciousness. Anyway, will understand what I mean next time, when you try to build your next dream.
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The translator’s task Walter BENJAMIN An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s “Tableaux Parisiens”,1923. In The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2000.
When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account. Not only is every effort to relate art to a specific public or its representatives misleading, but the very concept of an “ideal” receiver is spurious in any discussion concerning the theory of art, since such discussions are required to presuppose only the existence and essence of human beings. Art itself also presupposes man’s corporal and spiritual essence — but no work of art presupposes his attention. No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience. Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original? That would seem sufficient to explain the differing status of original and translation in the domain of art. In any event, it appears to be the only possible reason for saying “the same thing” over again. What does a poem “say,” then? What does it communicate? Very little, to a person who understands it. Neither message nor statement is essential to it. However, a translation that seeks to transmit something can transmit nothing other than a message —- that is, something inessential. And this is also the hallmark of bad translations. But what then is there in a poem —and even bad translators concede this to be essential — besides a message? Isn’t it generally acknowledged to be the incomprehensible, the secret, the “poetic”? That which the translator can render only insofar as he — also writes poetry? This in fact leads to another distinguishing mark of bad translation,which can be defined as inexact transmission of an inessential content. And we never get beyond this, so long as translation claims to serve the reader. If it were intended for the reader, then the original would also have to be intended for the reader. If the original is not created for the reader’s sake, then how can this relationship allow us to understand translation?
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Translation is a mode. In order to grasp it as such, we have to go back to the original. For in it lies translation’s law, decreed as the original’s translatability. The question of a work’s translatability has two senses. It can mean: will it ever find, among the totality of its readers, an adequate translator? Or, more pertinently, whether by its very essence it allows itself to be translated, and hence — in accord with the meaning of this mode — also calls for translation. In principle, the first question can be answered only in a problematic manner, the second apodictically. Only superficial thinking will, by denying the independent sense of the second question, declare them to have the same meaning. In opposition to this it must be pointed out that certain relational concepts gain their proper, indeed their best sense, when they are not from the outset connected exclusively with human beings. Thus we could still speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even if all human beings had forgotten it. If the essence of such lives or moments required that they not be forgotten, this predicate would not be false, it would merely be a demand to which human beings had failed to respond, and at the same time, no doubt, a reference to a place where this demand would find a response, that is, a reference to a thought in the mind of God. The translatability of linguistic constructions would accordingly have to be taken into consideration even if they were untranslatable by human beings. And mustn’t they actually be untranslatable to a certain degree, if a rigorous concept of translation is applied? In that case we must ask whether the translation of certain linguistic constructions is required. For this proposition is relevant here : if translation is a mode, then translatability must be essential to certain works. Translation is properly essential to certain works : this does not mean that their translation is essential for themselves, but rather that a specific significance inherent in the original texts expresses itself in their translatability. It is clear that a translation, no matter how good, cannot have any significance for the original. Nevertheless, it stands in the closest connection with the original by virtue of the latter’s translatability. Indeed, this connection is all the more intimate because it no longer has any significance for the original itself. It can be called a natural connection, and more precisely a vital connection. Just as expressions of life are connected in the most intimate manner with the living
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being without having any significance for the latter, a translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its “afterlife” or “survival” [Überleben]. Nonetheless the translation is later than the original, and in the case of the most significant works, which never find their chosen translators in the era in which they are produced, indicates that they have reached the stage of their continuing life [Fortleben]. The notion of the life and continuing life of works of art should be considered with completely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in ages of the most prejudiced thinking it has been suspected that life must not be attributed to organic corporeality alone. But there can be no question of extending its dominion under the feeble aegis of the soul, as Fechner attempted to do; not to mention defining life on the basis of still less decisive aspects of animal life such as sensitivity, which betokens life only occasionally. Rather, it is only when life is attributed to everything that has a history, and not to that which is only a stage setting for history, that this concept comes into its own. For the range of the living must ultimately be delimited on the basis of history and not of nature, without mentioning such unstable notions as sensitivity and soul. From this arises the philosopher’s task, which is to understand all natural life on the basis of the more comprehensive life of history. And isn’t the continuing life of works incomparably easier to recognize than that of creatures? The history of great works of art knows about their descent from their sources, their shaping in the age of the artists, and the periods of their basically eternal continuing life in later generations. Where it appears, the latter is called fame. Translations that are more than transmissions of a message are produced when a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. Hence they do not so much serve the work’s fame (as bad translators customarily claim) as owe their existence to it. In them the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding. As the unfolding of a special, high form of life, this unfolding is determined by a special, high purposefulness. Life and purposefulness — the connection between them seems easily accessible but nevertheless almost escapes knowledge, disclosing itself only where that purpose, toward which all the particular purposes of life tend, ceases to be sought in its own sphere,
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and is sought instead in a higher one. All purposeful phenomena of life, as well as life’s purposefulness itself, are in the final analysis purposeful not for life, but for the expression of its essence, for the representation of its significance. Thus translation ultimately has as its purpose the expression of the most intimate relationships among languages. Translation cannot possibly reveal or produce this hidden relationship; however, translation can represent this relationship, insofar as it realizes it seminally or intensively. In fact, this representation of the intended object by means of an incomplete form or seed of its production is a very special mode of representation seldom to be encountered in the domain of nonlinguistic life. For in analogies and signs non-linguistic life has types of reference other than intensive, that is, anticipatory, intimating realization. — This imagined, inner relationship among languages is, however, a relationship of special convergence. It consists in the fact that languages are not alien to each other, but a priori, and independently of all historical connections, related to each other in what they want to say. With this attempt at an explanation the discussion seems clearly to have come out, after futile detours, at the traditional theory of translation. If the relationship among languages is to demonstrate itself in translations, how could it do so except by conveying the form and sense of the original as accurately as possible? Of course, the traditional theory would scarcely be able to define this concept of accuracy, and thus could give no account of what is essential to translation. In truth, however, the relationship among languages shows itself in translations to be far deeper and more definite than in the superficial and indefinable similarity of two literary texts. To grasp the true relationship between original and translation, we must undertake a line of thought completely analogous, in its goal, to those taken by critical epistemology in demonstrating the impossibility of a reflection theory. Just as in critical epistemology it is shown that there can be no objective knowledge, or even the claim to such knowledge, if the latter consists in reflections of the real, so here it can be shown that no translation would be possible if, in accord with its ultimate essence, it were to strive for similarity to the original. For in its continuing life, which could not be so called if it were not the transformation and renewal of a living thing, the original is changed. Established words also
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have their after-ripening. What might have been the tendency of an author’s poetic language in his own time may later be exhausted, and immanent tendencies can arise anew out of the formed work. What once sounded fresh may come to sound stale, and what once sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic. To seek what is essential in such transformations, as well as in the equally constant transformations of sense, in the subjectivity of later generations rather than in the inner life of language and its works, would be — even granting the crudest psychologism — to confuse the ground and the essence of a thing or, putting it more strongly, it would be to deny, out of an impotence of thought, one of the most powerful and fruitful historical processes. Even if one were to consider the last stroke of the author’s pen the work’s coup de grâce, that would not suffice to save this dead theory of translation. For just as the tone and significance of great literary works are completely transformed over the centuries, the translator’s native language is also transformed. Indeed, whereas the poetic word endures in its own language, even the greatest translation is destined to be taken up into the growth of its language and perish as a result of its renewal. Far from being a sterile similarity between two languages that have died out, translation is, of all modes, precisely the one called upon to mark the after-ripening of the alien word, and the birth pangs of its own. If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translation, it does so otherwise than through the vague similarity of original and copy. For it is clear that kinship does not necessarily involve similarity. In this context the notion of kinship is in accord with its narrower usage, to the extent that in both cases it cannot be adequately defined by similarity of origin, although the concept of origin remains indispensable in defining the narrower usage. — Wherein can the kinship of two languages be sought, apart from a historical kinship? No more in the similarity of literary texts than in the similarity of their words. All suprahistorical kinship of languages consists rather in the fact that in each of them as a whole, one and the same thing is intended; this cannot be attained by any one of them alone, however, but only by the totality of their mutually complementary intentions : pure language. Whereas all the particular elements of different languages — words, sentences, structures — are mutually
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exclusive, these languages complement each other in their intentions. To gain a precise understanding of this law, one of the most fundamental laws of the philosophy of language, it is necessary to distinguish, within intention, the intended object from the mode of its intention. In “Brof and “pain” the intended object is the same, but the mode of intention differs. It is because of their modes of intention that the two words signify something different to a German or a Frenchman, that they are not regarded as interchangeable, and in fact ultimately seek to exclude one another; however, with respect to their intended object, taken absolutely, they signify one and the same thing. Thus whereas these two words’ modes of intention are in conflict, they complement each other in the two languages from which they stem. And indeed in them the relation between the mode of intention and the intended object is complemented. In the individual, uncomplemented languages, the intended object is never encountered in relative independence, for instance in individual words or sentences, but is rather caught up in constant transformation, until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all these modes of intention. Until then it remains hidden in the various languages. But if languages grow in this way until they reach the messianic end of their history, then it is translation that is ignited by the eternal continuing life of the work and the endless revival of languages in order to constantly test this sacred growth of languages, to determine how distant what is hidden within them is from revelation, how close it might become with knowledge of this distance. To say this is of course to admit that translation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other. A dissolution of this foreignness that would not be temporal and preliminary, but rather instantaneous and final, remains out of human reach, or is at least not to be sought directly. Indirectly, however, the growth of religions ripens into a higher language the seed hidden in languages. Thus translation, although it cannot claim that its products will endure, and in this respect differs from art, does not renounce its striving toward a final, ultimate, and decisive stage of all linguistic development. In translation the original grows into a linguistic sphere that is both higher and purer. It cannot, however, go on living indefinitely in this sphere, since it is far from attaining it in all parts of
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its form; but it nevertheless at least points, with wonderful penetration, toward the predetermined, inaccessible domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled. The original does not attain this domain in every respect, but in it lies that which, in a translation, is more than a message. This essential kernel can be more precisely defined as what is not retranslatable in a translation. One can extract from a translation as much communicable content as one wishes, and this much can be translated; but the element toward which the genuine translator’s efforts are directed remains out of reach. It is not translatable, like the literary language of the original, because the relation between content and language in the original is entirely different from that in the translation. In the original, content and language constitute a certain unity, like that between a fruit and its skin, whereas a translation surrounds its content as if with the broad folds of a royal mantle. For translation indicates a higher language than its own, and thereby remains inappropriate, violent, and alien with respect to its content. This fracture hinders any further translation, and at the same time renders it superfluous. For every translation of a work at a specific point in the history of language represents, with respect to a specific aspect of its content, translation into all other languages. Thus translation transplants the original into an — ironically — more ultimate linguistic domain, since it cannot be displaced from it by any further translation, but only raised into it anew and in other parts. It is not for nothing that the word “ironically” reminds us here of Romantic modes of thought. The Romantics, more than any others, gained insight into the life of works of art, to which translation bears the highest witness. The Romantics, of course, hardly recognized the significance of translation, turning their attention instead entirely toward criticism, which also represents a genuine, though narrower, element in the work’s continuing life. But even if their theory was not much inclined to focus on translation, their great translation work itself was accompanied by a sense of the essence and dignity of this mode. This feeling — everything points to this — need not be at its strongest in the poet; it may in fact play the smallest role in him qua poet. History certainly does not suggest that major translators are poets and minor poets are mediocre translators, as is generally believed. Many of the greatest, such as Luther, Voss, and Schlegel, are incomparably more important as translators than as poets, and others, such as Hölderlin
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and George, cannot be adequately described solely as poets when the whole range of their work —and especially their translations — is taken into account. Just as translation is a distinctive mode, the translator’s task may also be conceived as distinctive and clearly differentiated from the poet’s. The translator’s task consists in this : to find the intention toward the language into which the work is to be translated, on the basis of which an echo of the original can be awakened in it. Here we encounter a characteristic of translation that decisively distinguishes it from the poetic work, because the latter’s intention never is directed toward language as such, in its totality, but solely and immediately toward certain linguistic structurings of content. However, unlike a literary work, a translation does not find itself, so to speak, in middle of the high forest of the language itself; instead, from outside it, facing it, and without entering it, the translation calls to the original within, at that one point where the echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the foreign language’s work. Its intention is not only directed toward an object entirely different from that of the poetic work, namely toward a language as a whole, starting out from a single work of art, but is also different in itself : the poet’s intention is spontaneous, primary, concrete, whereas the translator’s is derivative, final, ideal. For the great motive of integrating the plurality of languages into a single true language is here carrying out its work. In this integration individual propositions, poetic structures, and judgments never arrive at agreement (since they remain dependent on translation); it is rather the languages themselves that agree, complemented and reconciled with each other in their mode of intention. If there is nevertheless a language of truth, in which the ultimate secrets toward which all thinking strives are stored up, at peace and even silent, then this language of truth is — “the true language.” And in fact this language, in the anticipation and description of which lies the only perfection philosophy can hope to achieve, is concealed intensively in translations. There is no muse of philosophy, and there is also no muse of translation. They are not, however, philistine, as sentimental artistic folk would like to think. For there is a philosophical genius, whose essential characteristic is the longing for the language that is announced in translation. “Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: penser étant écrire
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sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité.” If what Mallarmé conceives in these words is rigorously applied to the philosopher, then translation, with its seeds of such a language, stands halfway between poetry and doctrine. Translation’s work is less prominent than doctrine’s, but it puts its mark on history no less deeply. If the translator’s task is regarded in this light, then the paths to its fulfillment threaten to become all the more impenetrably dark. Indeed, this task — that of bringing the seeds of pure speech to ripeness in translation — seems impossible to accomplish, determinable in no realization. And isn’t the ground cut out from under any such realization if the reproduction of meaning is no longer the criterion? Viewed negatively, that is precisely the import of all the foregoing. Fidelity and freedom — the freedom of rendering in accord with the meaning, and in its service, fidelity in opposition to the word — these are the old, traditional concepts in every discussion of translation. They no longer seem useful for a theory that seeks in translation something other than the reproduction of meaning. Indeed, used in the conventional way, they are perpetually caught up in an irresolvable conflict. What precisely can fidelity actually contribute to the reproduction of meaning? Fidelity in translating the individual word can almost never fully render the meaning it has in the original. For this meaning is fully realized in accord with its poetic significance for the original work not in the intended object, but rather precisely in the way the intended object is bound up with the mode of intention in a particular word. It is customary to express this by saying that words carry emotional connotations. In reality, with regard to syntax, word-for-word translation completely rejects the reproduction of meaning and threatens to lead directly to incomprehensibility. For the nineteenth century, Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles represented a monstrous example of this kind of literalness. Finally, it is self-evident that fidelity in rendering form makes rendering meaning more difficult. Hence the demand for literalness cannot be deduced from the interest in maintaining meaning. The latter serves the undisciplined license of bad translators far more than it serves poetry and language.
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Therefore this demand, whose justice is obvious and whose ground is deeply concealed, must necessarily be understood on the basis of more pertinent relationships. Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language. For that very reason translation must in large measure turn its attention away from trying to communicate something, away from meaning; the original is essential to translation only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his work of the burden and organization of what is communicated. En arche hen ho logos, in the beginning was the word : this is also valid in the realm of translation. On the other hand, the translation’s language can, indeed must free itself from bondage to meaning, in order to allow its own mode of intentio to resound, not as the intentio to reproduce, but rather as harmony, as a complement to its language in which language communicates itself. Hence reading a translation as if it were an original work in the translation’s own language is not the highest form of praise, especially in the age when the translation is produced. On the contrary, the meaning of the fidelity ensured by literal translation is that the great longing for the completion of language is expressed by the work. True translation is transparent, it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible above all by conveying the syntax word-for-word, and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is the original element of translation. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is the arcade. While fidelity and freedom in translation have long been seen as conflicting tendencies, it also seems that this deeper interpretation of one of them does not reconcile the two, but on the contrary denies the other any justification. For what can the point of freedom be, if not the reproduction of meaning, which is no longer to be regarded as normative? Only if it can be posited that
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the meaning of a linguistic construction is identical with the meaning of its communication, does something ultimate and decisive remain beyond any message, very near it and yet infinitely distant, hidden under it or clearer, broken by it or more powerful. Beyond the communicable, there remains in all language and its constructions something incommunicable which is, depending on the context in which it is encountered, either symbolizing or symbolized; symbolized however in the development of the languages themselves. And what seeks to be represented and even produced in the development of languages is that kernel of pure language itself. But if this hidden and fragmentary kernel is nevertheless present in life as something symbolized, it inhabits linguistic constructions only as something symbolizing. While this ultimate being, which is therefore pure speech itself, is in languages bound up only with the linguistic and its transformations, in linguistic constructions it is burdened with heavy and alien meaning. Translation alone possesses the mighty capacity to unbind it from meaning, to turn the symbolizing element into the symbolized itself, to recuperate the pure language growing in linguistic development. In this pure language — which no longer signifies or expresses anything but rather, as the expressionless and creative word that is the intended object of every language — all communication, all meaning, and all intention arrive at a level where they are destined to be extinguished. And it is in fact on the basis of them that freedom in translation acquires a new and higher justification. Freedom does not gain its standing from the communication’s meaning; it is precisely truth’s task to emancipate freedom from meaning. Rather, freedom demonstrates in the translation’s own language what it can contribute to the service of pure language. To set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language, to liberate the language imprisoned in the work by rewriting it, is the translator’s task. To this end he breaks through the rotten barriers of his own language : Luther, Voss, Hölderlin, George have all extended the frontiers of the German language. — What now remains for the significance of meaning in the relationship between translation and original can be easily summed up in a comparison. Just as a tangent touches a circle fleetingly and at only a single point, and just as this contact, not the point, prescribes the law in accord with which the tangent pursues its path into the infinite, in the
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same way a translation touches the original fleetingly and only at the infinitely small point of meaning, in order to follow its own path in accord with the law of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic development. Without naming or grounding it, Rudolf Pannwitz has characterized the true significance of this freedom in certain passages of his book Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur which, next to Goethe’s remarks in the notes to his Westöstlicher Divan, must be by far the best thing published in Germany on the theory of translation. He writes : “our translations even the best start out from a false principle they want to germanize Indie Greek English instead of indicizing, graecizing, anglicizing German, they are far more awed by their own linguistic habits than by the spirit of the foreign work [...] the fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the state in which his own language happens to be rather than allowing it to be put powerfully in movement by the foreign language, he must in particular when he is translating out of a language very distant from his own penetrate back to the ultimate elements of the language at that very point where image tone meld into one he must broaden and deepen his own language through the foreign one we have no notion how far this is possible to what degree each language can transform itself one language differentiates itself from another almost as one dialect from another but this happen not when they are considered all too lightly but only when they are considered with sufficient gravity.” To what extent a translation can correspond to the essence of this mode is determined objectively by the translatability of the original. The less value and dignity its language has, the more it is communication of meaning, the less is to be gained from it for translation, up to the point where the overpowering weight ofthat meaning, far from being a lever for producing a translation fully in accord with its mode, makes the latter impossible. The higher the work’s constitution, the more it remains translatable, in the very fleetingness of its contact with its meaning. This is of course true only of original works. Translations, on the contrary, prove to be untranslatable not because meaning weighs on them heavily, but rather because it attaches to them all too fleetingly. For this as for every other essential aspect, Hölderlin’s translations represent a confirmation, particularly his translations of the two
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Sophoclean tragedies. In them the harmony of languages is so deep that meaning is touched by language only in the way an Aeolian harp is touched by the wind. Hölderlin’s translations are prototypes of their mode; they are related to even the most fully realized translations of their texts as a prototype is related to a model, as a comparison of Hölderlin’s and Borchardt’s translations of Pindar’s third Pythian ode shows. For that very reason they, more than all others, are inhabited by the monstrous and original danger of all translation : that the portals of a language broadened and made malleable in this way may close and lock up the translator in silence. The Sophocles translations were Hölderlin’s last work. In them meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language. But there is a stopping point. It is, however, accorded only to holy scripture, in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed dividing the flow of language from the flow of revelation. Where the text belongs immediately to truth or doctrine, without the mediation of meaning, in its literalness of true language, it is unconditionally translatable. No longer for its own sake, but solely for that of the languages. With regard to this text such boundless trust is required of translation, that just as language and revelation must be united in the text, literalness and freedom must be united in the form of an interlinear translation. For to some degree all great writings, but above all holy scripture, contain their virtual translation between the lines. The interlinear version of the holy scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.
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Apology for the error Agustín FERNÁNDEZ MALLO El País. Madrid: 02/02/2008.
When somebody starts writing he believes in perfection, then he realizes that what matters is the error. I do not mean the error resulting in moral judgments, but the pure, raw error. In an important article (The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music, Kim Cascone , MIT, 2000 ), it was written that “the error has become a prominent aesthetic in most arts at the end of twentieth century “, and quoted the words of Colson Whitehead, “mistakes are what guide evolution, perfection offers no incentive for improvement.” As a writer, that is something I feel very close. And mistakes, sometimes, the more stupid they are, better they get. I am listening to a song, I listen a verse and I think that I would give an arm to have written that sentence that eventually inspires me a poem and also a character for a novel. One day I read the booklet of the LP and I see I was mistaken; the singer said otherwise. I guess creativity is all about taking advantage of errors for your own benefit, to use what is in the margins, noise, waste, as somebody who states that he has learned to read using the largest library in the world: the trash bins that host millions of texts in empty containers. Important works have been made through anomalies, if we understand as anomalies the aberrant mutations produced in a discipline. This anomaly is the error we usually discard, the imperfection, the remainder; a suburb. But there is where the DNA from what we usually call arts is found. Masterpieces derivatives from failure are many, Las Vegas, Nicanor Parra, Sex Pistols, Georges Perec, and so on. There
is
an
especially
interesting
error-generating
mechanism,
the
appropriation: a writer removes a piece of the instruction manual of a washing machine, and inserts it as it is between two paragraphs of his own work or, maybe, of Don Quixote [which is itself the Big Failure of universal literature]. If the insertion is properly applied, the reader detects a short-circuit, and the canonical and symbolic order, even the semantic one of Don Quixote blows
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up. For a moment the judgment on this new work is suspended in a limbo, in a suburb of literature, very keen to create a new and intense poetic under that mistake. I am home, finishing these notes. In a couple of hours there is a program on TV that I have to watch, it is an interview I gave. To watch oneself on TV is exciting, but also very unpleasant, you feel in that rectangle the entrance to the topography of a slide whose depth you do not know, something like vertigo you feel while driving in a highway and suddenly realizing you drive in the wrong direction. You see your face to pretend to erudition on the television, you listen to yourself, you trace your feasible errors in seconds, there is one, panic [or the accelerating car against your headlights, and you make a sudden change of direction, and you do not know which scenario will lead this error, if it would be a new work or if it would mean two meters below ground] [I should reread Crash by J.C. Ballard].
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Bibliography
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MAGAZINES GA detail. Global Architecture Detail. Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA, 1997. Herzog & De Meuron 109/110. Madrid: El Croquis. 2004 Sejima Nishizawa SANAA 1983-2004. Madrid: El Croquis, 2007.
BOOKS Atelier Bow Bow. Graphic anatomy Atelier Bow-Wow. Tokyo: Toto, 2007. Prada, Juan Martín. La apropiación posmoderna, Madrid: Fundamentos, 2001. Reynolds, Ann. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004. Vila-Matas, Enrique. Perder Teorías. Barcelona: Planeta, 2012. Virilio, Paul. L’accident originel. Paris: Galilée, 2005.
MOVIES Nacho Vigalondo. Code 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FetVxLHBgt4
MUSIC Markus Popp / Oval Score. Retina. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMIVLTlObQ Matthew Herbert . Around the House. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0woJVhjcEgU
WEBPAGES http://ocw.upm.es/proyectos-arquitectonicos/Architectural-Design-UDSoriano-2012-13
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