Translation

                                                        War Series: Shipping Out (1947)
                                                                    Jacob Lawrence
                                                         Image via the Whitney Museum

What do you see in the above image? 

What media are used?

What events are portrayed?

What emotions are evoked? 

Here, Jacob Lawrence acts as the ultimate translator. First, he translates raw materials--egg tempera, a twenty-by-sixteen inch composition board--into images, skilled interpretations of the human figure, wartime weaponry, soldier-to-soldier relationships. Then, he translates history into the present (or rather, his present). Though the work's title and dress of its central figures may portray a modern war, it is merely a translation of a past traumatic event into a current reality: Middle Passage. Lawrence translates imagery of the Middle Passage--cramped black bodies, one stacked on top of the other--into a World War II setting, giving past traumas a language understood by newer generations.


The question then rises: does one have to be a firsthand witness of the trauma to speak its language? And if not, in the case of Lawrence, is one at too much of a risk of mistranslating the original pain, the original meaning?


What More Can I Say?- The Grey Album (2004)
Combined truths of Jay-Z and the Beatles, translated through the eyes of Danger Mouse

Whenever translating realities into text, tech, jazz, language, art, voice, prose, poetry, drum, dance, or song, there is a risk of losing meaning in the space between the minds, cultures, experiences, and outlooks of the creator and the interpreter. But there is also a risk of gaining meaning through this space, even, dare I say, through mistranslation. Different interpretations are simply are simply an affirmation that reality, like jazz, is made of combined layers of sound, experience, and truth. If a work loses some truth from the original creator, but then gains some of a different truth from the interpreter (which is then lost by the following viewer only to be replaced by the viewer's truth), does that make it any less true? Does that make it any less reliable, any less real? Or does that make it more real, more true, as it is a collaboration between many languages, many truths, and not just one's own?