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The London Routemaster: Competition and Inspiration


The old London bus, originally uploaded by loscuadernosdejulia.

The photo you see in the post was made in London this July, as I was walking from the Strand to Trafalgar Square (I took the picture from the staircase that led to the Royal Society of Arts). In the morning I took a bus from Lancaster Gate to Euston, left my luggage to store, and then took my favourite walk from Euston Rd to Russell Sq and down Southampton Row. From there I got to the Strand, and from the Strand I walked to Trafalgar Sq. I was planning to visit Victoria and Albert Museum, but I didn’t want to take the tube, nor did I want to hop on and off the different buses. Eventually, I took the Heritage Route no.9 bus from Trafalgar Sq that circulates between Royal Albert Hall and Aldwych. But in the picture above you see the second of the two heritage routes, no. 15; it operates between Trafalgar Sq and Tower Hill.

Routemaster in Wikipedia
London Routemaster Heritage Route

And so, more on the subject of passion. The comments you can read on this photo’s page on Flickr sound as if they’d been left by a native Londoner. In fact, Jason Albright (aka austinmini1275) is the native of Hagerstown, MD (the U.S.), and has always been interested in transportation, and the London buses, in particular. He also pointed out to the fact that in the photo I managed to catch not one, but two London icons: the Routemaster and the FX4-type black cab. As the person who easily mistakes Ford Beetle for Lamborgini, I am completely in awe with Jason’s competence.

As some of you might know, Boris Johnson vowed during his campaign for the Mayor of London to bring the Routemasters back. In spite of mixed comments, Mr Johnson is keeping his word on this, and here is the New Bus for London competition. The competition closes on September 19th, 2008. To make things clearer, the new London bus design will be based on the AEC Routemaster, but the organisers, and Mr Johnson in particular, are aiming to go further. They want to hear from both professional designers who can submit the whole plan and regular commuters who can contribute their experience and ideas for improvement. The first prize is the hefty £25,000, with several smaller awards for “great ideas”.

Whether London buses will all be Routemaster-esque by 2012 or not, is the matter of time and money. This will certainly be a great feature to enhance the Olympics experience for the capital, but exactly how efficient it is, one will have to wait and see. The current biggest drawback of the Routemasters is that they don’t accommodate the needs of disabled passengers and don’t have sufficient space for prams and luggage.

I got to use the Routemaster in spring 2004 when I visited London for the first time ever. I was staying in a hostel in Fitzroy St and taking a bus from Tottenham Court Rd to Euston Rd, to visit the British Library. One day I took the Routemaster, and the experience of riding it later transcended into verse: in the 2004 poem called The Ship, which is in fact dedicated to the London Routemasters, I compared the experience of being of this bus with the experience of sailing in the open sea. The verbatim translation is below; the Russian original is in the form of a fourteen liner:

I am a random passenger on the ship.
I come aboard and say farewell to calm.
I leave the shore behind and sail
Forth, wherever the ship takes me.

A captain-conductor accepted me as an equal
And doesn’t mind sharing his stand with me,
And so I lose the sight of the shore,
While watching the waves, in excitement.

And at the very moment when the ship
Sails into the ocean, and from the distant lands
The seagulls come and bring to her their sorrow,

I feel: I behold the entire world.
And there, beneath, the road rolls like a wave,
And in the wind I sing the song of freedom.

English translation © Julia Shuvalova

Visiting London – 9

And so it finally happened. Since my first visit in 2004 I’ve been to London in all seasons, except summer. Thanks to Beck’s Canvas, this gap in experiencing London is no more.

This visit, somewhat strangely, also filled the gap in experiencing the Virgin train service. Or, perhaps, I should be more precise and say that the service itself was impeccable, as has always been the case of the Virgin trains, as far as my travelling with them is concerned. The timing, however, was not, although on my way there and back it was to my advantage, in the end. There is obviously nothing good about standing at the platform at either Piccadilly or Euston, in the crowd of people desperate to get on the train. As I had a small suitcase, I was observing the scores of passengers like myself, “relishing” the approaching onslaught on the luggage spaces. To my amazement, I was able to use the entire lower part of such space in my compartment just for my luggage. On the way back, because I wanted to get from South Kensington to Euston on the bus, I was slightly short for time. Yet again, the service was delayed.

My hotel which I was able to find through LastMinute.com was in Sussex Place, a walking distance from Lancaster Gate and the Hyde Park and from Paddington. It was on this trip that my long-lasting dream of living in a room with a balcony finally came true. This was handy, as the two nights in London were quite hot. At first I tried to avoid opening window on to the balcony, which was shared with the room next door, but common sense took over.

I don’t remember if I ever mentioned it last year. In my last two visits to London I was amazingly lucky to get the neighbours who were totally oblivious of the possibility of other people moving into a room nearby while they were out in the town. The neighbours I had in April 2007 would normally return to base at around 11pm, smash the door, and chat, laugh, and have a shower in the next hour. This time the neighbours came in after 4am, and the routine was more or less similar. What made the difference was, of course, the time of their return, and the fact that I couldn’t sleep well that night and had just managed to drift off.

I met yet another taxi driver who visited Moscow and St Petersburg in the Soviet times and had fond memories of going to different museums. I once again had the pleasure of talking to people I never knew – a couple at the Aberdeen Steak House in Paddington (left), a limousine driver in Kensington Gore. I also realised that I know London well enough to persuade someone who was walking towards Euston Station in search for St Pancras International that they walked in the wrong direction. Eventually I took a long walk from Euston Road through Southampton Row and Strand to Trafalgar Square, where I hopped on an old London bus (like the one on the right) that took me to Exhibition Road, from where I walked to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

London 2008 on Flickr

Visiting London label (to catch up on older reminiscences of visiting and exploring London).

Simon Cunningham: “Looking Is an Activity”

The opportunity to attend Beck’s Canvas 2008 and to see the work by four RCA graduates instantly prompted me to inquire about an interview with one of them. I was offered to choose. I studied the winners’ profiles and, bearing in mind my own interest in photography, requested a talk with Simon Cunningham.

You can now listen to Simon’s interview below. In 18 minutes we find out about Simon’s work, artistic practice, inspirations, his views as an artist on using the WWW space… There is some laughter (as well as tinkling of the bottles in the background, with the gallery space then being prepared for the event), and a mad wizardy question at the very end of the talk. Once again, thanks to Simon, and to James Fell from OnlineFire for organising the interview.

Originally from the Midlands, Simon has now been living and working in London for a number of years. We are told that he sold more work than he has been able to exhibit, mainly through group shows and to private collectors . His shows in 2008 included exhibitions at Galleria Civica di Modena (Italy), Bloomberg SPACE (UK), and Espai Ubu (Barcelona, Spain). The list needs now to be updated with the show of his work at the RCA in Kensington Gore in London at the launch of Beck’s Canvas. In a way, Beck’s Canvas and Cunningham’s work were practically made for one another. In his work, Simon often explores the other “side” or “angle” of an image – and this is exactly what Beck’s Canvas is: it is a beer bottle label that can become an artist’s canvas.

The cornerstone of Cunningham’s artistic practice is the act of looking. As he aptly observes in his interview, he takes “looking” in the broadest sense of the word: “it’s about looking, and seeing, and searching…” – and I think we all too often forget about these “other sides” of any activity we undertake. “Mollymuddle” (left) is exemplary in this sense because in this video Simon attempted to record, in the proper sense of the word, all the stages of looking at an object. True, at the first glance it does look like a guy is merely holding his leg and staring at it. But try and look at it closer, or a bit longer, or from a different angle, and you will realise suddenly that there is more to this image. There is attention and tenderness in the image akin to mother-and-child relationship, and “Mollymuddle” may instantly become the newest reverberation of a mother-and-child theme in art. Think about multiple Our Lady and Christ representations where the baby Jesus is placed on his mother’s knee or in her arms, and looking at Simon’s face I think Leonardo’s “Madonna Litta” (right) may be a good reference; or we can recall pietà images. At the same time, the presence of a male figure, even recorded in this position, from this angle, may bring to mind the depth of Rodin’s work and Rodin’s preoccupation with human emotions and reactions. Or it may remind one of Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” (right). “Mollymuddle” and our own looking at it prove Simon’s faithful adherence to Wittgenstein‘s idea of perception: “the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged“. We can find many more references in “Mollymuddle”, while only looking at Cunningham’s solitary figure.

If it is possible to draw a quick conclusion from the above, it will be that Simon Cunningham is teaching us that there is a direct connection between looking, thinking, and envisaging. The actual physical activity becomes possible after all those stages, even if they are not strictly discernible. Not that this sounds totally new, but perhaps we expect – and are expected – to always be active, and hence “having a look” is dismissed as insufficient, one is urged to produce, to exert some effect upon the world. Simon’s work, quirky and poetic at once, proves that with looking there is more going on than meets the eye – to which his “Duckrabbit” is a perfect illustration. It suffices to say that after this work ducks and rabbits will never be as we knew them before.

Links for Simon Cunningham:

In Our World exhibition profile
.
RCA profile.
Personal website.

A few extracts from Simon’s interview:

About his work:

I am trying to make these images that are in a state of flux, that are kind of wrestling with each other, and I always try and force myself to see what I saw when I looked at the images as a whole, where I was trying not to see a duck, or a rabbit, but trying to see both at the same time…

About his art:

It’s about maybe trying and find my own practice and name it, and I’ve always had a problem with naming it. The work has become in a way outside of language, it’s what I can’t name, or meshing words together, like Duckrabbit. They’re all pushing things together to make new meanings.


About photography
:

Photography is fascinating! It’s a way of bringing you closer to something but always keeps you at distance, it’s quite like this frustrated things, it’s looking at the world, and my work in general is about looking in the broadest sense of the world. It’s about looking, and seeing, and searching… Photography was the most accessible way of pointing and not naming but saying “this has got something to do with that, but I’m not quite sure what it is”…

About the Royal College of Art:

That’s an experience. I came here very much aware of how precious it would be to have two years where you could just experiment. And maybe a lot of people get hung up on the show, but luckily what made it for me was getting a Paris studio residency for three months.., and it kind of liberated me. And it also made me understand that I never had a studio… The studio became a sort of architecture of the space, and that space swept everything together.

About Paris:

Paris is amazing, it’s just a dream space, and because I am not very good with languages, I could go down the street, and there was no noise. Not that I go around listening to other people’s conversations, but when I was there I would switch off and find my own space…

Beck’s Canvas 2008 at the RCA in London

Last year Los Cuadernos de Julia collaborated with Stella Artois, – and this year I was invited to Beck’s Canvas 2008 event in London. Like Illycaffe and Chateau Mouton Rothschild, so Beck’s have been supportng young artists for over 20 years by letting them use the Beck’s label as the canvas for their artwork. This year, however, is unique in that it saw Beck’s partnering with the Royal College of Arts to exhibit the work of the four RCA graduates.

As we are told,

2008 sees a landmark for the Beck’s art programme, with the launch of Canvas. For this very special project, we needed a very special partner. The Royal College of Art is a particular kind of ideas factory unlike any other. As the world’s only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design, the college boasts a global reputation for artistic excellence and an unrivalled creative environment. College alumni and internationally admired artists Tracey Emin, Tim Noble and the Chapman Brothers all created Beck’s labels during the 1990s. Then, as now, Beck’s was striving to support those determined to express themselves creatively. A partnership with the College presents a great opportunity to achieve this goal.

I attended the event on 16 July at the Royal College of Art in Kensington, next to the Royal Albert Hall (see the image at the top of the post). The preparation, however, started already in June when I was contacted by OnlineFire PR who found me via Technorati.

Below is a short video I put together using promotional images supplied by OnlineFire, as well as the examples of art work by the winning artists. You can also check Beck’s Canvas 2008 photoset on Flickr. An interview with Simon Cunningham will be coming up shortly, that will include some transcribed excerpts.

I would like to thank OnlineFire for the invitation, and particularly James Fell, who has been a great help in providing information about the event and artists, setting up an interview with Simon, and supplying me with images.

Last but not least, congratulations to the artists!

Links and further information on the artists:

Riitta Ikonen

Originally from Finland, Riitta believes the Beck’s Canvas project resonates with her own belief of taking art out of the gallery for people to see in a wider context. In her mind individualism is a little space inside your head reserved just for you, like a private restaurant table that serves you anything you think to want.

Riitta takes inspiration from ‘the performance of images, through photography and costume design. Certain things, usually small and insignificant, excite me to the point that I have to wear them and then document that process.’

Key achievements for Ritta include featuring on the cover of a ‘mail art’ book published by Lawrence King Publishing and compiled by Flat 33 (RCA Alumni). She has also been interviewed by WWF for her ‘Snowflake’ project, which was funded by the RCA and addressed climate change in the Baltic. In November 2007, Riitta was commissioned by the Tate to produce an interactive costume experience and has most recently been shortlisted for the Adobe Creative Futures 2008.

Riitta is currently still working on producing a herring costume for a dive in the Baltic Sea – another attempt at raising the awareness of climate change in the area. She is also contributing to a campaign to encourage commuters in London to interact on the underground, as well as working with the Tate’s events programme. Plans for the future include travelling around the world to create artwork that highlights local issues for charitable use, “I’d love to take my work to Japan; go to Mongolia to work hard; go to Cuba for the amazing colours and people; learn new skills and share ideas with unique people.”

Tom Price

Tom Price, 26 is an alumni of Sculpture (2006). Subsequent to this, he received a First Class BA (Hons) Sculpture from Chelsea College of Art in 2004 and currently works from his South London studio, in Brixton.

In April 2008, Price exhibited a solo presentation of his art at the NEXT Art Fair, Chicago and will also be showing work at the ‘Personal Freedom Centre’ in October during Freeze Week at the Hales Gallery. Other awards include receiving the Sir John’s Cass Bursary, which allowed him to study at the Royal College of Arts.

Price is now working on new sculptures and continues to explore different materials and formats.

Simon Cunningham (his profile at RCA)

Simon Cunningham is an alumni of the MA Fine Art, photography course (2007) Cunningham lives and works in London.

Cunningham has sold more work than he has been able to exhibit mainly through his group shows and to private collectors. Cunningham is currently exhibiting film and photography work in Fragile at Espai Uba in Barcelona and also in Italy as part of ‘In our world’ at Galleria Civica de Modena.

Charlotte Bracegirdle

Charlotte Bracegirdle, 34, is an alumni of the Masters degree in painting (2006). Originally from Broardhembury, Devon, Charlotte spent seven years applying to art schools across the UK before accepting a place at the RCA.

Charlotte has previously been awarded the Davis Langdon award (2006) and was shortlisted for 2007’s New Contemporaries.

Plans for Charlotte’s future are to continue painting and exhibiting her work, she is currently working towards an exhibition for the Madame Lillies Gallery, Stoke Newington, running from 10 September 2008. Bracegirdle dreams to be an artist in residence at the National Gallery, she loves all the history in there and dreams to spend all her days painting.

Raphael, Degas, and the 16th c. music

2004 saw the first exhibition of Raphael in England. In November I happened to be in London, and my first visit to the National Gallery naturally included a voyage to the Sainsbury Wing. I had mere half an hour to enjoy some 40 works of one of the Titans of Renaissance. To see them, I had to gently if politely wriggle past some visitors, or queue up where it was impossible to squeeze through. Everyone who knows the Sainsbury Wing will recall its catacomb-like interior: low ceilings, dim light, rather small rooms with dark walls – hardly a backdrop for the rich Italian masterpieces.

At exactly the same time they were exhibiting Edgar Degas upstairs. The works of French artist resided in two or three well lit halls with tall ceilings and light pastel-colour walls, there were not many visitors (it was one of the first days of exhibition, I should note). Most paintings were of medium size, in front of every second or third of which there stood a Far-Eastern girl with a pad and some crayons, copying the works of one of the greatest Impressionists. To this day I cannot fathom why these two exhibitions could not be swapped places.

I wrote a lengthy text about it in Russian in the same 2004, contemplating on how these two exhibitions manifested our attitude to art. I was probably a bit harsh to suggest that it was easy to admire the classical art because then no-one would find a fault in your taste, but on second thoughts this is hardly far from the truth. Indeed, one would rather be ridiculed if they admitted liking pop music than if they admitted liking Mozart. Same with Raphael. As Henry James put it, Raphael was a happy genius, and by looking and admiring his Madonnas we seek to find happiness, too. Raphael is also easier to comprehend, unlike his contemporaries. Leonardo is very intellectual, to which La Gioconda is a good proof. Michelangelo’s devotion to the physique is sometimes baffling, as can be seen, for instance, in the figures on the Medici monument. Raphael, on the contrary, is always pleasant, always radiant, always rich in colour, and even if his end may not be as happy as his paintings, we probably shall still forget about it when we observe his work.

It is different with Degas. Degas was known for his perfectionism, and many times in his life he turned to rework his own paintings, as the examination of certain works, e.g. Portrait of Elena Carafa, shows. The name of the exhibition – “Art in the Making” – further highlights Degas’s critical, intellectual approach to his work. The British art historian Kenneth Clark in his book “The Nude: A Study in the Ideal Form” (N.Y., 1956) says, in particular, that Degas excelled at what the Florentine artists of the 16th c. would call “disegno” (i.e. a drawing, a sketch). He focused on a human figure as his main theme, but aimed to capture the ideal image of the movement of this figure, and especially the energy of this movement. Degas’s painting is more vigorous than Raphael’s, and his Madonnas are not only nude, they are also depicted in the poses or at such activity that many of us would still deem inappropriate. Still, again in the words of Clark, had the figures painted by Michelangelo come to life, they would have scared us to a far bigger extent than Degas’s naked women.

Thanks to his colour palette, techniques, and themes, Degas appears more disturbing, almost revolutionary, compared to Raphael. I noted in my text that in the three centuries, from Raphael to Degas, the very attitude to art had changed. As far as Madonnas are concerned, after the European revolutions of the 19th c. and on the eve of the First World War they became more emancipated, they drank absinthe and spent evenings in the Parisian cafes. Their blurred faces, loose hair and outrageous nudity were the symbols of their time, the sign of the fear of changes and of the vulnerability in the face of the outer world. Their movement and individuality were more prominently expressed in comparison to their Renaissance predecessors. Like many other Impressionists, Degas is much more “relevant” to our time, but as it happens we prefer to turn to what gives us hope and faith, and Raphael seemed to be a perfect saviour. Apparently, I concluded, when people turn to the classical art, they seek peace; and when they find peace, they’ll think of a revolution.

Nevertheless, I bought a wonderful CD at the Raphael’s exhibition, The Music of the Courtier, which contained several beautifully performed pieces by the late 15th – 16th cc. composers. One of this, Dilla da l’acqua, by Francesco Patavino (1497?-1556?), performed by I Fagiolini, has become an instant favourite, and I hope you enjoy it too.

http://media.imeem.com/m/xMPLqzqmmW/aus=false/

The paintings used (from top, left to right, clockwise):

Raphael, La Donna Velata (c. 1514-1516)
Edgar Degas, Portrait of Elena Carafa (c. 1875)
Raphael, Madonna of the Pinks (c. 1506-1507)
Michelangelo, The Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici (1526-1531)
Leonardo da Vinci, La Gioconda (c. 1503-1506)
Raphael, Madonna Connestabile (c. 1502)
Edgar Degas, La Coiffure (Combing Her Hair) (c. 1896)
Edgar Degas, Russian Dancers (c. 1899)
Raphael, Ansidei Madonna (1505)
Raphael, Lady with a Unicorn (c. 1505-1506)
Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (c. 1879)
Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising (c. 1860)
Edgar Degas, After the Bath (c. 1890-1895)
Raphael, St Catherine (c. 1507)

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=loscuadernos-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0006BAUKI&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=loscuadernos-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0140435077&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=loscuadernos-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0691017883&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

The Story of Discobolus

Imagine this: you’ve been waiting to take a picture of something. You found a perfect angle, even conjured a title for your photo, but your precious sight is an object of adoration for too many people, mainly tourists. They keep coming up to it, their figures exuding admiration, and their eyes lit with fever of connoisseurship. They don’t notice you. Worse still, they sometimes appear in front of your camera at the exact moment of your pressing the button.

Let’s not be dismayed by tourists – for all I know, I may be just as inconsiderate. Occasionally, though, this inconsideration becomes a blessing in disguise, as I found out when I visited London this April.
I went to the British Museum, and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of Discobolus. I saw this statue in the books before, and I had previously visited the British Museum and taken a picture of it. But for me, it is a historic statue in more than one sense.

When I was in my first year at the University in 1997, we had a course in Art History and had to pass an exam. The task was to list all (or as many) monuments (sculptures, edifices, paintings) from a particular period in Art History within 40 min. After 40 min. the (now late) examiner collected our papers, checked them immediately and told us, whether we passed or not. I sat next to a girl who had a question about Ancient Greek art and knew it very poorly. This is when Discobolus appears. This statue was made by Myron during the classical period of Greek art (in the 5th cc. BC). The lecturer also touched on Homer whose lifetime – between 8th-7th cc. BC – is seen to have initiated the entire Classical Antiquity.

I vividly remember the girl asking me, if Discobolus was made by Myron or by Homer. I confidently whispered ‘Myron’. Nonetheless, the girl ended up writing that Discobolus was sculptured by Homer during the Myronian period. This true story became one of the best-loved anecdotes of the Faculty of History at the Moscow State University.

This time in London, when I first tried to take a picture of Discobolus, a group of visitors with children was around the statue. The parents did move, but a child, being a child, couldn’t stand still, and eventually I wasn’t satisfied with my first attempt. I decided to wait, but the visitors kept walking up and down the staircase, not even intending to disappear. I decided to wait out and took this picture – I thought it sent an interesting message (right).

Just as the staircase emptied, a couple appeared out of the blue. The woman struck a pose beside Discobolus, the man took a photo of her, and then the woman walked to the man, and they froze at the top of the stairs looking at the pictures they’ve taken. I stood several steps below, clutching my mobile phone and wondering, if they would possibly move elsewhere, so I could have a clear view. The speciality of the moment was in that there were only us three on the staircase, so providing they’d moved I could take a decent shot of Discobolus.

But no, they didn’t move. They were totally oblivious to the fact that the British Museum is one of London’s principal attractions and is visited by thousands of people each day, who may fancy taking a picture of Discobolus. I put it down to the special feelings they shared. Me, I was alone, and my despair was beyond imagination.

I was released from despair by my own roguish spirit. To paraphrase the well-known saying, if Discobolus couldn’t show its unspoilt angle to me, I was going to find an unspoilt angle of Discobolus. I suddenly realised that the majority of pictures of the statue were taken from the staircase. But what about the actual frontal view? Well, here was one.


What a sense of liberation that was! Nothing could stop me now. Another staircase was behind me, which was decorated with a vase. There was something intriguing about a composition involving Discobolus and the vase (left). And then I went as far as to almost lie on the stairs, to take the picture on the right.

So, waiting and not getting to snap Discobolus from a conventional point of view was entirely worth the trouble. Even for me, for whom Discobolus was anything but unknown, to see this sculpture in so many different compositions was a great way to enjoy it again. I know for a fact that next time I’m at the museum, I’ll be looking for something unusual in the objects I might photograph. And so should you – who knows what story you may be able to tell?

Visiting London-8 (London Book Fair)


Yet another seminar at the LBF was just as important, interesting and thought-provoking, not least because I could relate to its subject as an author, translator/interpreter, and historian. The seminar ‘Globalisation, Translation, and English’ had two questions to answer: how to make publishers commission translations from other languages into English, and how to make them, as well as the public, to acknowledge the role of a translator?

To begin with, where is a problem here? Foreign literature is not being translated into English, so what? Surely, there’s enough English-language books around – in fact, there’re so many of them that the authors of guides like ‘How To Write a Novel’ start with discouraging a budding author from ever dreaming of making it big (they do so by reminding you that to get ‘ad astra’ you need to drag yourself ‘per aspera’ many times).

To use Prof Eco’s powerful thesis, a translation is a negotiation between the cultural milieu of the source text and that of the destination text. Elsewhere in Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation Eco says that “translation is a process that takes place between two texts produced at a given historical moment in a given cultural milieu”. There are many gains and losses to be accepted, but ultimately every good translation serves to enrich the language of the destination text by exploring its ability to communicate all the aspects of the original text. Translation is also important in keeping us connected to the past. It is especially vital today, when fewer and fewer people learn classical languages.

The enrichment of the language, however, is mostly important in hindsight. At present, if we care to learn our language better, we can simply scour The Oxford English Dictionary and the like. This would be much like striving to improve oneself by living on one’s own and never interacting with other people. Such belief in one’s uniqueness often leads to alienation and decline.

Translation therefore is the way to enrich the culture of the country of the destination text. It is the acquisition of knowledge about a country and a period where we do not live (and often never will). It can also be a source of inspiration: not necessarily an impetus to write, but rather to learn more about the author, his country, or the country and the period in which the novel was set, etc. In the end, literature exists everywhere, but our knowledge of foreign languages is always limited, so we constantly need to negotiate the development of our literature and culture by producing literary translations.

For instance, the development of English language and literature in the 16th c. was much fostered by the boom in translations from the classical and European languages. (I include the translation of the Bible in this list, since it was written in vulgata). Arguably, where this process was concerned with translating the antique historical texts, it was sometimes instigated by the acquaintance with the works of Machiavelli. Together with translations from Petrarch by Thomas Wyatt, followed by many other renderings of purely literary works of both antique and contemporary authors, this boom in translations was as much a means to enrich the English language, as a very important part of the English Renaissance.

The trouble is, and this has been highlighted at the seminar, a translation is often being treated as not. This means that all its educational and artistic merits are being treated on the same scale as those of an originally written text, which can lead to costly misconceptions. Once I came across an article, in which a scholar was comparing a 16th c. translation to a 20th c. translation from Latin, almost disregarding the original Latin text. Several times in his short study he concluded that the 20th c. translator was rendering the text into English better that his 16th c. colleague, – whereas his first purpose should’ve been to determine why it was exactly this text that had been translated. In addition, the scholar did treat the translation as an originally composed text. Given the blossoming of such discipline as Translation Studies in the past 15-20 years, you (myself at least) would have expected its findings to influence the academic community. Alas, this isn’t always the case. 

One of the first things to do when a translation is being chosen for an academic study is to undertake its textual analysis by comparing it against the original text. This is a painstaking and time-consuming procedure, which requires a lot of knowledge and research. If it is done, however, then we’re likely to obtain a very fine example of an academic study which will shed tons of light on the cultural and intellectual process in the given country at the given time.

As follows from the above, translation is a critical act, which again was mentioned at the seminar. Yet it is evident that no translation can be purely theoretical. A text is a rhetorical act which appeals not only to our understanding, but also to our feelings. I firmly believe that it is a mistake to disregard or to avoid translating this emotional message. This means, in turn, that a translator is always a writer or a poet (depending on exactly what is being translated), which further stresses the importance of his role.

Translation is a difficult subject to discuss, a tricky business to run, and a Titanic labour to undertake. But when one considers how many people across the globe have been influenced by the works of William Shakespeare, it is obvious that all the efforts of his translators have not been in vain.

Visiting London-7 (London Book Fair)

In Visiting London-6 I mentioned and already wrote about a few seminars that I attended at the LBF. One of these was on the subject of marketing a bookshop.

Marketing Your Bookshop was presented by Peter Fisk, a respected marketer who spent years of working with and gained an invaluable experience at British Airways, Microsoft, American Express, and Coca Cola. He is also one of the most inspirational and engaging speakers I’ve seen (and heard) in my life. His style of presentation is of the kind I like to listen to and to deliver myself.

Although focused on marketing a terrestrial bookshop, the presentation has had a far wider scope, and an attentive listener would take away from a one hour talk probably as much as they would after days of intensive training and reading. Needless to say, the advice given is equally applicable to online marketing as well.

Two very basic ideas are genuinely simple: to run a successful business in the modern-day world, you need 1) to combine your logic with your creativity and 2) to cater for the needs and desires of your customer. Legion is the name to those needs, but tuning in to your customers’ voices can ultimately help you enhance and even expand your business. The necessity to expand may be inevitable even for funeral businesses (after all, you may be not the only undertaker in town). Apparently, in the States they began to recognise the fact that the funeral should be a celebration of the life of the deceased, rather than an endless mourning of their death. As a consequence, some American undertakers began to expand their business into the area of fireworks trade and to offer a choice of a firework display to perform at the scattering of the ashes.

Yet the cleverest point of the presentation is Peter’s continuous referring to the two distinct, genuine individuals who in a very powerful way challenged and shaped the 20th c. – Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. The idea of a successful marketing is in bringing together one’s creativity and one’s logical thinking. Picasso and Einstein are referred to as those who embodied creativity (Picasso) and logic (Einstein). As being shown, however, Picasso had received an in-depth academic training in painting, whereby he was eventually able to overthrow the canons of his art and to pave the road to a new artistic vision. Likewise, Einstein, as brainy as he was, had been a dreamer who dreamt up some of his groundbreaking theories while walking in the mountains. Both Picasso and Einstein were capable of such complete success at their “trade” because, in the end of the day, both used logic and knowledge AS WELL as their creative potential.

This point is not only valid, but very powerful indeed, as it shows that a successful business is not just about figures, money, and the GP. Furthermore, Fisk potently demonstrates that art and business are not completely polar, as many of us tend to believe. He doesn’t recommend to turn your business into “show business”, but he urges to try and find this elusive equilibrium of creative thinking and knowledge. Quite simply, if you’re knowledgeable, look to make a new creative use of it. If you’re an artist, don’t lose your mind to the untempered creative impulse.

I suppose the latter point must sound strange coming from somebody creative (myself on this occasion). But, even if we look no further than at the works of literature, we’ll notice that all of them that survived their time and continue to impact and inspire us to this day are not just “lovely stories” or “serious stuff”. Beautiful in form, these works often hide many powerful intellectual challenges. For example, I have noticed long ago that people tend to think that poetry, as art in general, is all about emotion. In fact, it is about concealing the emotion, distancing from it, in order to capture its essence. One of my favourite Russian poets, Konstantin Balmont, when still young, was told by one of the older writers: ‘Let your inspiration crystallise first, then write’. “To crystallise the inspiration” means exactly what Peter Fisk is talking about in his presentation: to apply strict logical thinking to a creative impulse.

Links:

Marketing Genius at Amazon.com.

Marketing Genius Live – information about the book, seminars, launches, as well as a few free videos and extracts.

The Genius Works – more about Marketing Genius and Peter Fisk, plus more downloads. (Take a note of the website’s name.)

Peter Fisk’s presentation Business Strategy by Einstein and Picasso (video) from The Genius Works.

Visiting London-6 (London Book Fair)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I visited several presentations while at the Book Fair. There were actually four of these:

Marketing Your Bookshop (16th April)
The Internet as a Marketing Tool (17th April)
Copyright in Context: From Da Vinci to Blogging (17th April)
Globalisation, Translation, and English: a Discussion of Best Practices (17th April)

The Internet as a Marketing Tool was intended to look at how publishers and publishing houses could use the WWW space to promote books and authors, which all boiled down to a few examples of creating more or less fictional websites to bring the books out to the audience. The use of YouTube was also discussed briefly, but I picked upon the point made by one of the panellists. Some authors, he said, were writing great stuff but had little interesting to say, when meeting with their readers online or in person. Apart from the question if a writer should be a good speaker (I think so), this point is important when we think of ghost-writing.

Copyright in Context: From Da Vinci to Blogging had a misleading title, to begin with. Or perhaps, such title reflects the reality in which we now live. When I read “Da Vinci”, I first and foremost think of Leonardo. In the case with this seminar, “Da Vinci” was an abbreviation of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. I allow for a possibility that this was an error that ended up on the website and in the booklet. But it is nonetheless a peculiar error. The talk centred first on discussing various legal suits that concerned plagiarism, which nowadays comes in two forms: borrowing an idea and borrowing facts. As far as blogging goes, the main topic here wasn’t so much the protection of copyright on the web (which would involve the discussion of Creative Commons licence), but rather about ethical issues. What to do if you’re being abused through your blog? Or what if somebody accidentally or purposely abuses you?

(This presentation only touched upon the issue of ethical blogging, but this issue has recently been highlighted in these two posts on BBC Manchester Blog. First, Kate Feld looked at Manchester bloggers’ reaction to the suggestion to develop a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. And then Robin Hamman turned a critical eye on whether or not it is appropriate to use blogs when some of them are supposed to remain private or semi-private. The question rose following the use of blogs to report on Virginia Tech tragedy, and I would expect it to generate a discussion. As far as BBC Manchester Blog goes, it is an open community, so follow through to Robin’s post to read and to share your thoughts on this.)

Links:

Robin Hamman, When Is a Blog in Public Meant to Remain Private?

Visiting London-5 (London Book Fair)

Three years ago, during my first visit to London, I was researching in the day and writing at night. This April I went there for the annual London Book Fair. I will not write about it more than you could already have found at the LBF official website.
My main impressions are:

  • meeting with my old University friend (yes, this world is really small!);
  • buying an English translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America (I’ll be writing about this later);
  • attending three very interesting presentations;
  • spending about half an hour with a very interesting multilingual lady, who recently wrote a book about a cultured cat.

I’ll leave the third one out till later. Meeting my old friend was one of the biggest surprises in my entire life. I wrote somewhere on the blog about the new website that aims at bringing together current and former students from all Russian high education institutions. So this girl has finally registered there in early April, we exchanged a couple of messages, and then we found out that both of us were going to London for the Book Fair. Naturally, we decided to meet, which occurred in the form of stumbling into each other in the foyer. Soon after we sat outside chatting about each other and our unimates.

Strange things come out in these conversations. We had a girl in our year, who was a dedicated student of German medieval monasticism. Although a devoted Russian Orthodox, she was once very seriously discussing with another girl, whether they should attend the Christmas service at a Catholic or a Protestant church in Moscow on December 25th. Ultimately, she went to study in Germany for a year, where she’d met her present husband, a Muslim, for whom – reportedly – she’d converted into Islam. On one of the photographs we saw she was wearing a burqa.

Buying an English translation of Mayakovsky’s digest of visiting America was another huge surprise. When I saw the book on the stand, it didn’t even occur to me that I may not be able to buy it. So I just asked how much it cost. I bagged it with no problem whatsoever. Yet believe it or not I still haven’t read D. H. Lawrence, so when I saw several of his books on Wordsworth Classics stand, I asked if I could purchase Sons and Lovers. Turned out, they weren’t actually allowed to sell books. This was confirmed at another stand where I saw a book on successful blogging.

And the lady I spoke to is Brigitte Downey – a multilingual, cultured, well-travelled, exuberant person who spent years making documentaries and loving opera, and who had some wonderful recollections of Russia and Russian ballet. Half an hour that we spent chatting after I shared with Brigitte my knowledge of search marketing by explaining the difference between organic and sponsored results is the time to remember. And Chapter One of Diaries of a Cultured Cat is generally reminiscent of my experience of Moscow and Manchester that I have mentioned in chapters 1 and 4 of Visiting London.

In Egypt, as we know, cats were worshipped. And in 1932 T. S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats that was adapted for the stage by Andrew Lloyd Webber. You can browse the chapters from Old Possum’s Book here, but this is an extract most relevant to us:

You’ve read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
to understand their character.
You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whome we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse –
But all may be described in verse.

Brigitte Downey is describing this in prose, but even after one chapter I feel her knowledge and style will make this book an insightful reading.

Links:

Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America
Brigitte Downey, Diaries of a Cultured Cat
T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
London Book Fair
Wordsworth Classics
Brigitte Downey’s website

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