How is it that the right words in the right order can become a moment of clarity? Some reading experiences are like this: you become completely enthralled by a paragraph or a sentence in a novel and you wish you had written the thing yourself. This happened to Nicola Gunn, except she read the sentence in English, and it wasn’t what the author had written because the author actually wrote it in French. And how is it that a character in a film is really only a succession of images on a screen? This process happens in the editing room and often doesn’t reflect the experience of the actor portraying the character or even the script written by the writer.
What happens in translations? What are the gains and what are the losses? Can something remain the same while being fully transformed? Can something be two things at once? How to be both? The original and the translation? The source and the target? The old and the new? The recorded and the live? The translator and the author? And what kind of coherence do we make of all this text and image and what does it say about our desire and our fantasies?
In Text and Image, Nicola offers her own fantasy life as a place to start thinking together from. The work moves between philosophical questions about translation and a deeper search to put into words and pictures a feeling that seems impossible to articulate: an attempt to translate desire and re-write the self.
