In translation

I started writing in my books this summer. 

I was one of Those before: a don't-touch-my book, don't-bend-my-spine, don't-you-dare-earmark-my-pages-or-heaven-forbid-write-on-them reader. Rules applied to those who borrowed my books - a highly scrutinised few, granted - as much as they did to myself. My books were in pristine condition, as though they'd never been read. That's exactly the look I held to. My copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, on the contrary, was earmarked, torn, bent, highlighted, crisp from spilt water, aged from living permanently in my satchel for a year, and tattooed cover to cover, page to page, line to line, in every margin possible, with thoughts, annotations, reactions, ideas. It's one of my favourite books to aimlessly flip through, or hold open on one of the many pages that it now naturally falls to - or indeed that fall out of it given the aged state of the spine. I love that it's been read and owned, that I can look back through it and see my many translations of the text: the starred quotes I loved, the heavily biro-underlined quotes I found contention with, the highlighted quotes I learnt for my AS English Lit exam; the earmarked, torn or now loose pages I read a hundred and one times; the tentative thoughts I penciled in on my first reading, the black biro I etched in as we analysed the text in class, the reds, blues, pinks and greens I painted in as I read, and re-read, the text in those frantic weeks leading up to the exam and the quiet dusky weeks that followed. It gives the words agency. Dorian Gray is not, to me, a black and white text confined to the ruled, bound pages of a Penguin Classic; it's a narrative that's always in translation, whose meaning I've bled into interpretations on the pages. 

I lent my friend three of my books a few weeks ago. 

Some poetry by Maya Angelou, Every Sexism by Laura Bates and an essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In all three I've translated the texts across the margins, between the lines and on the blank cover pages. She flicked through their pages as I handed them to her. "Oh! You've written in them!" I was intermittently reading essays by John Berger in 'Confabulations' and poetry by Yrsa Daley-Ward in 'Bones' last night, underlining, starring, writing, when I suddenly thought about the possibility of someone reading or interpreting my scribbled translations of the texts, and what they'd think. For that's exactly what I'm doing when I write in my books: I'm translating them. I'm taking their ideas, narratives, words, images, and re-narrating them into a palimpsest layered with my own narratives, words, images and thoughts. Translating them into me, the narrative of my life and what those words mean to it, in it. I wonder if the thought of someone possibly reading these translations shaped how I constructed them. Did I try to become more intellectual, provoking, fulfil the Cambridge stereotype that my future grandchildren would hold of me as some witty, all-knowing, sharp, critical 19 year old undergraduate student? Did I try to project a narrative of myself for others to read? Did I, in the act of translating a text, translate a version of myself onto the pages for others to interpret the Chloe etched into the cover page of the book as? 

I read an essay a few years ago that claimed there was no such thing as originality. 

How original. The author subscribed to the idea that everything was mere translation, that every thought had been thought before, every idea had, each word a mere reincarnation of a former life. And I've always thought how sad that was, to say that translations lacked originality, that they themselves weren't original. Who else would interpret a poem on time travel or an essay on Picasso in the same way as me? Yes, my interpretations are the translations of the words I've read before, the motion pictures I've watched previously, and the conversations I've had, or overheard, about time travel, or Picasso, or both, but the way that I use these translations, the way that I translate them and use them to translate something else, is entirely mine. And that makes them original. How we define originality has everything to do with the potential for originality. If we subscribe to an unoriginal, blasé understanding of originality as something totally new, then nothing is original and all thoughts lose agency. For how can we ever explicate ourselves from that which contextualises us? We don't exist in isolation, and neither do our narratives, thoughts, actions, the things we create. Everything is influenced by something, as much as we may deny it, implicitly or otherwise. And I think that's what makes something so exciting: to see what contextualises its originality, what influenced its translations, what it translates, who, where, when, why. The stories behind the abstract. I'm a translation of the places I've been, the people I know, the texts I've read, the things I've done, and without them, without their influence, I'd be an abstract noun, adjectiveless, static, dull. If it makes me original to lack influence or translation, I'd rather unoriginality. 

"Thought and language are to the artist instruments of art."

"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray