{"id":13211,"date":"2020-07-23T14:56:33","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T12:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/?p=13211"},"modified":"2021-12-02T08:58:29","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T07:58:29","slug":"i-am-invisible-but-you-see-me-well-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/i-am-invisible-but-you-see-me-well-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"I am invisible but you see me well enough"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":13212,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[353,414],"project_type":[],"class_list":["post-13211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-online-publications","project-collective-care-response-ability"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Padraig<\/span>:<\/span> Where to begin this discussion of care for text? I suppose it\u2019s first best to acknowledge that all three of us are in forever-love with the written word and a giggle amongst the profound. Secondly, we are all very aware, too, of the problems in this culture of publishing\u00a0for the sake of publishing. Of only ever being visible<\/em>, of only being \u00bbheard\u00ab by the herd. Even at the level of social media, the\u00a0maxim seems to be \u00bbI have\u00a0an opinion,\u00a0therefore I tweet.\u00ab But there are always lots of things behind the publishing\u00a0of texts; invisible labor such as language editing and translation. Jaime, you work as a language editor, and Polly as a Russian-to-English translator of literature and poetry (\u00bbEverything good begins with trans-\u00ab I think Polly said once). As publishable, perishable beings, we are nowadays also directed by algorithms\u00a0that (in)form opinion. Sadly, this is the only operational\u00a0way that affect becomes political. And affect does need to become political; but social media technology, or rather dictating, is making people very sloppy, perhaps even to the point of not giving a shit as long as an opinion is heard; a virtue peer-acknowledged, a PhD approved.\u00a0It's becoming more and more possible that language editing and translating will be done by algorithms that do away with the careful listenings and rhythms of writing.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> (Listenings in the plural! That\u2019s very important.)<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> I\u2019m not sure machines can learn to give a shit. Not in that <\/em>way. So\u00a0while we always talk about the death of the author, what about the work in the work of publishing \u00bbthe work?\u00ab To cut to the chase, let's call this the \u00bbgiving a shitness\u00ab in the work behind \u00bbthe work.\u00ab For example, Jaime, you literally just finished two volumes of pretty hard-core academic writing.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Yes, the two leviathans I submitted today comprised of 23 different authors, most of whom were annoyed with me for giving them such an \u00bbunreasonable\u00ab turn around time to check the typesetting proofs.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig:<\/span> The turnaround time was not your choice, though?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> No, it wasn\u2019t. The publisher gave me one week per 500-page volume.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> Christ on a bike!!<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> Hahahahhaha.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Hahahaha, yeah ... But, you just have to get the job done and make sure to communicate with the authors. We are all at the will of the publishers, like it or not. If the authors want to be heard, that is, they must abide. But as an invisible voice who gives a shit, I often take more shit than I feel I deserve. \u00bbThe nerve of that woman<\/em>,\u00ab I can almost hear them say.\u00a0\u00bbDoesn\u2019t she know who I am!? I am the\u00a0author, for Christ's sake!\u00ab<\/em>\u00a0But to be sure, I am the only person on this planet who will have read every word in both volumes (in all\u00a0four<\/em>\u00a0volumes, actually \u2013 the other two are not yet finished, although the third has just gone into production). I have literally spent years on these behemoths, carefully, painstakingly choosing just the right word to help my non-native English-speaking scholar-colleagues sound like native speakers. \u00bbEverything good begins with trans-,\u00ab said Polly Gannon. Touch\u00e9, Polly. Touch\u00e9.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> It\u2019s giving a shit and caring enough to Translate<\/em>.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> This issue we are skirting is to do with care, and other dubious terminology that describes the invisible labor other people do. This sounds too mechanical to say what I\u2019m trying to say, but this \u00bbgiving a shitness\u00ab for text is about legibility firstly, but also translation and rewriting, which is actually pretty complex in terms of inhabiting a voice, right?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> A line in one of Robert Frost\u2019s most famous poems (one of the poems, sadly, that is most misconstrued) reads: \u00bbSomething there is that doesn\u2019t love a wall, that wants it down.\u00ab The poem is called \u00bbMending Wall\u00ab and is often enlisted, especially these days, to justify the building of new walls, as well as keeping the old ones in working order. I read this poem in a much more complex way, because translation is a practice that concerns itself quintessentially with borders and walls. And, on the face of it, it is the translator who wants them down. Conventional wisdom (buttressed by etymology) holds that \u00bbto translate is to betray\u00ab (traduttore, traditore<\/em>).<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> I am fascinated by this erotics of \u00bbbetrayal\u00ab in the work of translating, and in some cases the idea of the language editor as a necessary enemy translating the author\u2019s voice into something that is legible in this more etymological, uhm ... sorry, that word always trips me up ... What am I saying? ... Ah yes, this betrayal of the language edit and translation is actually an issue of craft and care, trespassing enough of the raw word to betray it, so it fits into this habit of etymological legibility, or, of sentences literally making sense to as many people as possible.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> \u00bbBetrayal\u00ab is a very apt word here, I find. And there is definitely something sultry about it.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> Editing is very sultry!<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> As a language editor, I often have to re-work a sentence for structure and flow, or for example, a turn of phrase is used incorrectly in English and needs adjusting; and well, occasionally the response I get is that of the author feeling insulted, as if their text, their words were \u00bbbetrayed.\u00ab<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> Is that ego in the name of the authorial \u00bbname\u00ab though?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Yeah, some of this is ego, of course, but some is certainly due to the ambiguous nature of the act of translating or editing itself. Whereas I feel like I am caring for them and their words \u2013 their name, even \u2013 and caring for the reader, the author may feel that a line has been crossed. Who, then, is the author? Betrayal happens when that question becomes ambiguous.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> This is also where terminology like \u00bbcare\u00ab\u00a0becomes murky and dangerously sentimental. And in fact how editorial care translates into an adherence to a \u00bbproper language.\u00ab Whether care has \u00bbproper ethics\u00ab is much more complicated. To think about care, we also need to acknowledge notions such as trespass and betrayal, to somehow delineate \u00bbcare\u2019s\u00ab sultry ambiguity.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> The reasons for this ambiguity about the practice of translation is transparent \u2013the most obvious being this very transgression of a border (usually between \u00bbnatural languages\u00ab) that would seem to keep things where they belong. In order to translate between two languages \u2013 and this is a denuded, simplistic, reductive description of \u00bbwhat happens\u00ab when we translate \u2013 we make a decision to turn our backs on what is called, somewhat quaintly, \u00bbthe original,\u00ab and go in search of an equivalent, a simulacrum, a reflecting mirror of that original, in the \u00bbtarget language.\u00ab Terrible term, the less said about which the better. But in fact, there is also a plea built into the act of translating and language editing, since we are searching for \u00bbother ears\u00ab to hear it with, \u00bbother ears\u00ab to be heard by.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> I like this idea of being heard by \u00bbother ears\u00ab \u2013 giving access to these other ears is fundamentally an act of care for the text.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> Some sentences are better cared for by being \u00bbheard\u00ab in text, and not spoken out loud, so there is a sense of being privy to a certain privacy, or there\u2019s even a domesticity, to the work of translating and editing. So it is actually a pretty ambiguous, multi-layered exercise.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Absolutely. Texts \u00bbspeak,\u00ab they are meant to be read, or \u00bbheard,\u00ab right? So, in a way, translators and editors are in the middle, trying to open the text to \u00bbother ears,\u00ab maybe to use the gaps in the wall \u2013 to use your metaphor, Polly \u2013 to liaise between neighbours (or neighbouring languages). The image of Sigourney Weaver as the gatekeeper in the first Ghostbusters<\/em> (\u2122) film comes to mind. Or was it Rick Moranis who was the gatekeeper?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> Hahahaha ...<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> ... Hahahahaha, Sigourney Weaver the actress playing Dana Barrett possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper. So it\u2019s translator and editor as host of writers? Very Gertrude Stein meets Alice B meets the Montmartre modernism scene.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Hahahahah, exactly . . . So, thinking about one side of the wall containing the original and the other side, a \u00bbre-presentation\u00ab of said original, not only brings to mind translator-as-Sigourney-Weaver\u2013as\u2013gatekeeper (caretaker of wall, caretaker of ears, etc.), but it also makes me think about the text itself, right? Its existence in different forms, in various states: is it more a simulacrum or a mirror image or, rather an infinity mirror? because, let\u2019s be honest, it\u2019s a process.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> It\u2019s not as if text just arrives as mimesis of mind though anyway. Eventually, it needs a first reader, a first responder; or even a first aider if we think of the text as a living thing.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> I have been particularly trying to avoid the word mimesis<\/em> here for the gigantic can of worms it has the power to open ...<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> ... mimesis <\/em>is out I think these digital days, as is this question of the \u00bboriginal\u00ab (I cringe when I see unedited manuscripts in archives.)<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Yeah, so does \u00bbthe original\u00ab really exist so separately from its other-language equivalent?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> In fact, the practice of translating doesn\u2019t permit one to turn one\u2019s back on the original, or even to cross the border and stay there. That (dubious) luxury, of being on one side of the border or the other, belongs, if it can be said to belong to anyone, to the speakers and hearers of each language. The translator has no such luxury. It is the fate of the translator to inhabit the border itself, to make forays into new linguistic territory, and then return, repeatedly, to the \u00bbold world,\u00ab with its \u00bbold words,\u00ab back and forth, back and forth, but never straying too far from the border one is challenging, and dismantling, word by word. Or building.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> Multiple registers again.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> The translator has too many ears, too many tongues, to do just one thing. To be just one thing.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> \u00bbToo many tongues,\u00ab I like that.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Me too.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> Thinking of these multiple registers, like editor-translator-as-Sigourney-Weaver-as-gatekeeper, I keep thinking about Alice B. Toklas, whose autobiography was written by Gertrude Stein, her life partner. For me it\u2019s probably one of the most tongue-in-cheek titles in modernism: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, <\/em>but by Gertrude Stein<\/em>. In the 1952 oral history interview I sent you both of Toklas, she said that she did the typewriting of her Autobiography by<\/em> Stein. So Toklas\u2019s labor of typing Stein\u2019s writing also inhabits a weird type of border wall between authoring, translating (in mother tongue) and editing. Stein definitely did not turn her back on the \u00bbauto\u00ab in the \u00bbbiography\u00ab of Toklas, but rather turned the whole interconnectivity of autobiography on its head. So perhaps Stein was a host-listener, who wrote this autobiography of ... using the tongue of ... typed by the hands of ... Toklas. Like dressing up in each other\u2019s clothes? Could The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas <\/em>then be considered as a work of editorial or translator care? Or a betrayal or trespass into the mouth of the other?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> Your questions touch upon one of the most discomfiting and awkward issues in translation \u2013\u00a0what we might term a kind of \u00bbvoyeurism.\u00ab And the notion of care is central to this issue, too. If we consider voyeurism \u2013 with all its (dubious, but real) pleasures and dangers \u2013 to be about seeing while remaining invisible (i.e. \u00bbI am invisible, but I see you<\/em> well enough\u00ab), then the translator and language editor is open to these charges of voyeurism.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>:<\/span> Cleaners have access to things in a similar way, and can also be prone to invisibilities that make them privy to a voyeuristic form of \u00bblooking\u00ab too.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> Did you know proofreaders were referred to as the \u00bbcleaning ladies\u00ab of the text in the American South as late as 1995?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>:<\/span> Really!? You know, I\u2019m embarrassed to say, but I find it slightly irksome when someone refers to what I do as \u00bbproofreading\u00ab or \u00bbcopyediting\u00ab because my job actually involves a lot of re-writing, or rather \u00bbwriting-with.\u00ab But, proofreading and copyediting are absolutely vital steps in the production of the written work.\u00a0Yet, the differences between them lie, not so much with the particular job in question, but with permission. I am given permission to \u00bbwrite-with\u00ab; a cleaner is given permission to enter the private space of the employer; what they see there will never be the same thing the employer sees. The same is true of the \u00bbproofreader\u00ab who is permitted to look for errors that the author, who is so close to the work, cannot see for herself.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>:<\/span> So even if one is cleaning, translating or editing \u00bbwith permission,\u00ab there is a sense in which there is a kind of voyeurism at play, because the \u00bbauthor\u00ab can never see herself, her thoughts, or her (written) words, in their entirety. We are always blind to parts of ourselves that others can see, that others have access to. And when we are being translated, being edited, those parts of ourselves we can\u2019t or don\u2019t (wish to) see come into view. So the edit, the translation, is also a kind of mirror; and it is by definition a distorting mirror, if we are forced to see what we want to hide, from ourselves and, or, from others. I would say that it is very likely Alice and Gertrude \u00bbhad each other\u2019s permission\u00ab \u2013 their mutual vulnerability was the pact, and the pact was given the name of \u00bbAutobiography.\u00ab They definitely inhabited the wall together \u2026 they made the wall, the border, their home. And in reading their<\/em> (oh, the fecundity of pronouns these days!) Autobiography,<\/em> we actively contribute to its legibility, writing it (translating it, editing it, living it, loving it \u2026), too. That\u2019s care, all right. And it\u2019s a way of making the mirror gentle, not harsh and unforgiving. (Here, in this metaphor of the mirror, the notion of mimesis makes its entrance again; but we\u2019ll turn our backs on it, because it\u2019s not just a looking-glass, but a rabbit hole!)<\/span>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"img_gallery":false,"img":[13216],"img_gallery_format":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Jaime<\/span>: All of this very much strikes a chord with me on the notion of sincerity, which you and I have discussed at length in the past, Padraig.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: Yes. The voyeurism, in my writing about trespass in archives, particularly in 6\u20149: Notes from the archive of Dan Kane <\/em>(Publication Studio Rotterdam, 2016). <\/em>Significantly, Dan is also a translator of German, so his disappearance into pictures, and in the mirror\u2019s in the Kopfkino<\/em> pictures, was really interesting editing the final sequence of photographs with him. Where I was, as such, learning to edit in his vocabulary, or \u00bbpictorial pitch\u00ab as he describes it (there\u2019s a beautiful photograph that did not make it into the final picture sequence, it\u2019s a 1981 portrait of Dan\u2019s friend Jean, a simultaneous interpreter whom I met sometime in 2015).<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: The voyeurism, the autobiographical pact, the mutual vulnerability, the care \u2013 all topics or themes of the \u00bbnew sincerity\u00ab moment. We talked about it more recently too, in Weimar.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: Ah, Cathal Kerrigan and I spoke about Toklas when finishing Gaze Against Imperialism <\/em>(Metaflux Publishing 2019), with the historical \u00bbscenes\u00ab we were talking about. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas<\/em> is a peculiar sort of transcription too, as it is very likely that it was edited in some form by Toklas, who wrote in her Cook Book<\/em> that her autobiography was already done <\/em>(read: transcribed) by Gertrude. I think we talked about the \u00bbnew sincerity\u00ab moment because neither 6\u20149, <\/em>nor Gaze Against Imperialism, <\/em>were sentimental books?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: Right, and Stein was clearly no sentimentalist either. What I find interesting about this supposed \u00bbnew sincerity\u00ab moment, is that it not only marks a rejection of the \u00bbgasp and squeal\u00ab of postmodernism (as David Foster Wallace called it), but it rejects the modernist ideal of authenticity that writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and artists like Picasso were so concerned with (all of whom, as we know, were friends with Gertrude and Alice). People often use the two terms synonymously today, but there is a fundamental difference between them. Sincerity is a convergence of avowal<\/em> and actual feeling<\/em>. It is a means (\u00bbto thine own self be true\u00ab) to an end (\u00bbso that you can be true to others\u00ab). It\u2019s an inter<\/em>subjective and ethical project that dominated the Western cultural mind-set from Renaissance humanism up through the nineteenth century. In the modernist period, however, the quest for sincerity elided into the quest for authenticity ... and authenticity, in contrast, is marked by an inward, personal project. It\u2019s about subjective truth-seeking, the goal of which is to examine oneself rather than communicate with the other, thus making it an end in and of itself.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: Insincere care is dangerous. So in a way you can\u2019t have care without sincerity?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: Well, it seems so, and for the modernist \u00bbaudience,\u00ab then (the \u00bbother ears,\u00ab the viewer), was all but obliterated ...<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: ... True that. With Toklas and Stein it was different.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: And this is what I find so wonderfully poetic about the title, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas <\/em>by Gertrude Stein: the audience is still vital in this intersubjective project. They not only need the audience to get the joke, but they are, as inhabitants of the wall, each others\u2019 ears, each others\u2019 mirror, each others\u2019 memories in the writing of their \u00bbmemoir.\u00ab<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: In the 1952 interview transcript of Alice B. Toklas I find it really striking how she said that her only contribution to Stein\u2019s Autobiography<\/em> by her hand <\/em>was to remind Stein of two memories Stein <\/em>forgot to include in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas<\/em>. It\u2019s amazing that she says that her only contribution to publishing the autobiography was this reminding of forgotten memories.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: Then she says and the typewriting,<\/em> remember.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: Yes!<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: This part of the transcript is so interesting \u2013 and poignant, somehow, for our discussion of editing, translating and care.<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: I agree, but I can\u2019t put my finger on why?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: For me, it is what it says about memory and forgetting \u2013 who forgets what and why. Since Gertrude only \u00bbforgot two things\u00ab and only remembers, according to Alice, what is pleasant, one has to conclude that what made it into Alice\u2019s autobiography was very pleasant to Gertrude (no rhyme intended!) Anyway, it's clear from this that they were each other\u2019s memories. (Sharing! Caring! With the occasional gentle jibe or two \u2026) But so telling that the \u00bbtypewriting\u00ab is mentioned by Alice as a kind of afterthought. Not really a significant contribution. (And here I can\u2019t help but think of Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoevsky \u2013 they were definitely \u00bbMrs.\u00ab and not \u00bbMs.\u00ab \u2013 slogging away, typing their husbands genius \u00bbloose baggy monsters,\u00ab as Henry James called Russian novels.)<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: Stein the author on the level of genius husbands is a running joke of arrogance in the The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. <\/em>We could talk for hours about the gender construction in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, <\/em>but let me for now put it crudely: Stein was an out-and-out \u00bbtop\u00ab \u2026<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: \u2026 top button?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: Hahahaha<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: \u00bbTop button\u00ab! But this \u00bband the\u00a0typewriting!!\u00ab afterthought, is the\u00a0mechanical reproduction, or housekeeping, of\u00a0the written word. With spelling corrections, too, I\u2019m sure, as Toklas seemed like such a precise, poetic speaker. I\u2019d like to think of Toklas as an icon of editors and translators as carer\u2019s. As if this ambiguity in the work of editing and translating must sit on the ambiguous register of the \u00bbafterthought\u00ab, open to voyeurism, with all the necessary erotics and poetics of betrayal, and trespass.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: As an \u00bbafterthought,\u00ab should we add that we have been editing each other throughout this entire process?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: From a distance, in times of social distancing.<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: We are also betraying the form of a conversation, sticking with the trans-<\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: \u2013figuring?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: \u2013gressing?<\/span>\r\n\r\nJaime<\/span>: \u2013versation?<\/span>\r\n\r\nPadraig<\/span>: (sic)<\/em><\/span>\r\n\r\nPolly<\/span>: \u2019Nuff said.<\/span>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"

Padraig Robinson<\/strong> writes books and screenplays, and is currently working on the production of the feature film Masquerades of Research, based around the American sociologist Laud Humphreys. Recent work includes the book Gaze Against Imperialism (Metaflux Publishing 2019) launched as a reading room installation in the exhibition CHROMA<\/span>, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Padraig was a Visual Arts fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2019\/20.<\/p>\r\n

Jaime Hyatt<\/strong> has worked since 2015 as the in-house English-language editor at the Imre Kert\u00e9sz Kolleg Jena, an Institute of Advanced Studies with a focus on the history, culture, and societies of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Alongside her work at the IKK<\/span>, Jaime is pursuing studies in the field of ecocriticism and is the co-editor of the forthcoming special issue journal Embracing the Loss of Nature: Searching for Responsibility in an Age of Crisis ( COPAS <\/span>Issue 21.2 ).<\/p>\r\n

Polly Gannon<\/strong> is the director of cultural studies at the New York-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Cornell University, and has translated Russian to English novels such as Jacob\u2019s Ladder by Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Symmetry Teacher by Andrei Bitov, and Word for Word by Lilianna Lungina. She lives, teaches, and translates while pursuing a tactile and poetic engagement with the Semiotics of Textiles.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_spacer","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Leerraum-Container","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":12,"space_height":10},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_spacer","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Leerraum-Container","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"space_height":60},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_spacer","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Leerraum-Container","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"space_height":60},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_spacer","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Leerraum-Container","bgcolor":"has-bg-grey","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":2,"space_height":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"has-bg-grey","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"

Appendix<\/span><\/h1>\r\nExcerpt from \u00bbInterview with Alice B. Toklas\u00bb (1877\u20131967) conducted by Roland Duncan in 1952. The Bancroft Library Interview, Regional Oral History Office, University of California Berkeley, California\r\n\r\nDuncan:<\/span>[\u2026] <\/span>I have always been a little bit curious about your own autobiography, you know. Did Gertrude Stein write it completely by herself \u2013<\/span>\r\n\r\nToklas:<\/span> Yes, of course.<\/span>\r\n\r\nDuncan:<\/span> \u2013 or did you contribute some?<\/span>\r\n\r\nToklas:<\/span> Oh, no. No. What could I contribute? She would ask me, \u00bbHave I forgotten anything?\u00ab and I\u2019d say, \u00bbYes, you've forgotten this.\u00ab And then, when she got to a certain distance, there were two things in it that were important, that she should have mentioned, I said, \u00bbI don't know what you are going to find apropos, but there are two things you must get in that you've forgotten.\u00ab That's all. That was my contribution, and the typewriting. Oh, heavens, no. No, it was a great joke, really. This friend of mine up in Seattle, who was a musician and who later married an American colonel, and when he died she married a British colonel. As the British colonel says, \u00bbColonels are fatal to Louise.\u00ab Well, in any case, she was a very amusing person, and she had a way of poking fun at you very gently, and she said to me one day, \u00bbI suppose you are helping Miss Stein write her books, aren't you, Alice?\u00ab \u00bbOh, surely. Most of them are mine,\u00ab I said.<\/span>\r\n\r\nDuncan: But you must have helped in prompting her at times, I suppose?<\/span>\r\n\r\nToklas: No, the only things I helped her with were the two incidents that she should have mentioned, that I thought were important for her to mention, and which she had forgotten really. She had a memory but she didn't like unpleasant things. Things that she didn't like, she didn\u2019t remember \u2013 really, because it was the only way to get rid of the embarrassment of them.<\/span>\r\n\r\nDuncan: Just forgot?<\/span>\r\n\r\nToklas: But complete. So that when you spoke of them, she\u2019d say, \u00bbThat isn't true. Did that happen? When?\u00ab Then I\u2019d tell her. \u00bbOh, yes,\u00ab and she\u2019d sit back, \u00bbOh, yes.\u00ab She once denied \u2013 but I don\u2019t want that for publication \u2013<\/span>\r\n\r\nDuncan: Wait then. Wait till we get off the \u2013<\/span>\r\n\r\nToklas: Because it's a wonderful story. I oughtn\u2019t to tell it to you. It's an indiscretion, but you'll keep this entirely to yourself \u2013 of her memory, of her forgetfulness?<\/span>\r\n\r\nDuncan: But then, everyone forgets certain things.<\/span>\r\n\r\nToklas: No, Gertrude used to say of me \u2013 she had a friend who was an awful bore \u2013 \u00bbPomposa,\u00ab I called her. She was very pompous and pretentious. But Pomposa said one day, \u00bbI never forget, but I forgive.\u00ab And Gertrude said, \u00bbAlice is just the opposite. She doesn't forgive at all until she can forget. But she fortunately forgets.\u00ab Which isn't quite so true, I didn't forget so much. I just got less sharp.<\/span>"}],"intro_preview_headline":"I am invisible but you see me well enough","intro_preview_txt":"","intro_preview_img":13212,"post_id_old":"","post_author":[7009,13207,13208],"post_subtitle":"A transversation (sic) by Polly Gannon, Jaime Hyatt, and Padraig Robinson","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":false,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":21536,"post_copyright":"ccl_cc_by_nc_sa","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":[13336,13457,13341],"related_posts_post":[7009,13208,13207]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13211\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13341"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13457"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13336"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/13208"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/13207"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/7009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=13211"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=13211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}