Translation | Read Write Collect

Replied to

After listening to a revisionist history of the (people we've come to call the) Aztecs during my run this morning, I then powered home to 'Mesmerizing' -a slow-burn banger of a track:https://t.co/l1O3ZcVSQU https://t.co/6B1gdgDW9I

— ˗ˏˋ Doug Belshaw ˎˊ˗ (@dajbelshaw) June 22, 2020

Thank you for the Aztec tip. it made me wonder about the interpretation evidence and how every generation has its translations. As Walter Benjamin explains in The Task of the Translator.

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.

Liked Helen DeWitt (full-stop.net)

Writing can be a way of thinking. Sometimes it seems as though a voice comes into the head and one writes down what it says — that would count as thinking, it seems to me, only if any conscious mental activity counts as thinking.

You’ll probably see, from my answer above, that I don’t think thinking is always done in language. Tufte’s work surely shows a wide range of non-linguistic thought that makes use of the page.