White Space, Loneliness, and Moving with the Stars

Abstract

Inspired by a Q&A published in The Capilano Review, this creative essay investigates translation, Glissant’s Relation and movement as a connecting force.

Keywords: white space, translation, Relation, language, Glissant.

Language is an imperfect conduit. Translators understand this; there is always something left, hanging behind in the author’s intention.

In a 2013 conversation for The Capilano Review, two Canadian writers (Susan Holbrook and Nicole Brossard) called this gap “white space.”

“Something happens in the white space between the versions, something alive that surmounts both languages,” Holbrook said, referring to the English and French versions of Brossard’s feminist novels.¹

Holbrook saw this white space—between the original idea and its transformation to the next language—as alive and productive. It’s like crossing a bridge holding one item to unexpectedly arrive on the other side with a different item. The bridge’s apex (the point of transformation) is that thrilling moment where we locate “something alive that surmounts both languages.”²

In a similar vein, in the introduction to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing writes, “the stumbling blocks of a translation frequently exist at its most productive points”³ (1990, xi). Wing notes that where a translation falls down is a useful identifier: it reveals an area where two languages (cultures, ways of seeing the world) have yet to meet and forms a new connection. When two readers try to comprehend the same text in their own, unconnected languages, is a moment that Glissant would call Relation.

(Pause to consider: Are translators the original cultural ambassadors?)

But Holbrook and Brossard’s white space exists elsewhere, too—in the Relations inside oneself.

“What happens in the white space between a work and its translation,” Brossard says, “applies as well to what happens in the blank space between the narrative of the real in one’s mind and its transformation into written words.”⁴

Her comment reveals a profundity I always suspected but never fully understood. As I write, something metaphysical (what Brossard calls “floating semantic material”) takes shape, yet the process of physically writing changes it. The split-second act of fixing the idea on the page leaves something behind. She goes on to argue that even a “fixed” text on the page is in a temporary state until the translator or reader picks it up to make their own meaning.

Across all these stages of fumbling—the brain attempting to convey electrical signals that make up ideas—what is left behind? Perhaps, Brossard suggests, a piece of your truest self.

“In between a work and its translation, meaning is floating among all the fragments which make an identity of yourself,” she says.⁵

So, standing at the apex of that bridge, will I find meaning? Or will I find myself?

*

The imperfection of language is the listless fumbling of one human to another.

...like hands carrying sand...

The inadequacy of language is the anxiety of loneliness. Though we share this journey under the stars, I am alone in my experience. No one in the cosmos knows what it is to resonate at my particular frequency of cellular existence.

Artists are imperfect conduits. The urge to communicate is so strong it drives me into all kinds of energetic nonsense. I want to create work that gestures to something essentially, cosmically true: something that reveals a sweep of logic to the bend of the planets in orbit and the pull of water in the ocean. But the result is often on a less grand scale, revealing only the interior order of my own experience.

When words fail us, we groan, we tremble, and we move. When the electrical signals of thought are insufficient, we translate metabolism into motion and continue living. And when we move, we connect to the poetry of movement that guides constellations, forms volcanoes and creates frothy chaos at the sea’s edge.

Glissant writes that the world’s poetic force “fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the depths of our being.” He suggests that this energy or force will never run dry because it “is its own turbulence.”⁶

Deep inside us, cells vibrate, touch, and trade materials in a mysterious economy of exchange that fuels life itself—the quiet yet essential language of osmosis and diffusion. The quietest of all translations. If I close my eyes, I can feel their resonance.

*

An Invitation to Alignment

Stop for a moment to stand just so on the edge of the planet.

Listen for tectonic plates.

Feel the weight shifting across the small bones in your feet.

Breathe at the pace of the living things around you.

Find pleasure in aligning to the rhythm of the world “without being able to measure or control its course.”⁷

Sense the space between the crown of your head and a nearby star.

Pause on a bridge between thoughts, like a dandelion seed in the breeze, ready to take flight.

Bibliography

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Holbrook, Susan. 2013. “Delirious Coherence: An Interview with Nicole Brossard.” The Capilano Review 3.19 (Winter) Narrative: 5–14.

Wing, Betsy. 1997. Translator’s Introduction to Poetics of Relation, by Edouard Glissant, xi–xx Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Notes

1. Nicole Brassard, quoted by Susan Holbrook, "‘Delirious Coherence’: An Interview with Nicole Brassard," The Capilano Review, no. 3.19 (Winter 2013): 5.

2. Ibid.

3. Betsy Wing, "Translator’s Introduction" to Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), xi.

4. Brassard, quoted in Holbrook, "‘Delirious Coherence’," 5.

5. Ibid.

6. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 159.

7. Ibid., 124.

About the Author

Rachel Silver Maddock is an independent dance artist and writer based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, and MA Candidate at SFU’s School for Contemporary Arts. Her movement practice is nourished by the somatic and improvisational techniques of many brilliant artists including Peter Bingham, Helen Walkley, Natalie and James Gnam, Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject and Olivia Shaffer. She sees the body as a site of investigation, tool of expression and mysterious archive.

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