Translation as Culture

TLDR: The work of translation is an incessant shuttle that is a "life" as mentioned in this paper, and it is necessary but impossible to translate a human infant into a culture, and vice versa.

Abstract: In every possible sense, translation is necessary but impossible. Melanie Klein, the Viennese psychoanalyst whom the Bloomsbury Group killed with kindness, suggested that the work of translation is an incessant shuttle that is a ‘life’. The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a ‘translation’. In this never-ending weaving, violence translates into conscience and vice versa. From birth to death this ‘natural’ machine, programming the mind perhaps as genetic instructions program the body (where does body stop and mind begin?), is partly metapsychological and therefore outside the grasp of the mind. Thus ‘nature’ passes and repasses into ‘culture’, in a work or shuttling site of violence (deprivation – evil – shocks the infant system-in-the-making more than satisfaction, some say Paradiso is the dullest of The Divine Comedy): the violent production of the precarious subject of reparation and responsibility. To plot this weave, the reader – in my estimation, Klein was more a reader than an analyst in the strict Freudian sense –, translating the incessant translating shuttle into that which is read, must have the most intimate knowledge of the rules of representation and permissible narratives which make up the substance of a culture, and must also become responsible and accountable to the writing/translating presupposed original.